I've been meaning to write something along these lines for a while but I needed the right vehicle to deliver the message.
I think I've found it.
Nearly forty years ago, I was sitting in a high-school drafting class listening to Paul Harvey relay the following story:
"Janet Haroldson had a prize winning poodle, Trixie. She was convinced that the reason her dog had won so many contests is because she had a secret method of treating her dog's hair. Janet's secret was simple, she would heat up the oven and then put little Trixie in the oven for three minutes. This treatment would give her dog's hair extra curl which Mrs. Haroldson was convinced was the reason that Trixie had won so many awards.
Last Wednesday, hours before a show, Janet Haroldson discovered that her oven was broken. When she called around the neighborhood, Janet discovered that none of her neighbors were home. With no oven to use as a hair curler, Janet decided to try something else.
With the temperature setting on high and the timer set to three minutes, Janet put Trixie into her microwave oven, closed the oven door, and pressed the 'Start' button. Janet left Trixie in the kitchen when a delivery man rang the doorbell with a package she had been expecting.
'As I signed for the package, I could hear Trixie whining in the kitchen.' Janet explained. 'And then she started barking like crazy.'
Janet ran through the house and arrived to the kitchen just in time to witness Trixie exploding in the microwave.
There is no mention here as to how Trixie did in the dog show that day."
(While the above story is in quotes, it is a paraphrasing of what I heard.)
Today, this story would not pass the smell test, but... Forty years ago, there was no internet to fact check such things on, microwave ovens were still fairly new, and, besides, it was Paul freaking HARVEY! PAUL HARVEY WOULD NOT LIE TO US!!!
The point? Simple. Paul Harvey had credibility, credibility that survives even to this day. Where are the Paul Harveys of today? Even media types like Walter Cronkite have shown to have had some serious leftist agendas. These agendas were not apparent back then because of the naïveté of the viewing audience of the time. Looking back at those early broadcasts today reveals the truth that there never was, never is, and never will be any such thing as "objectivity," that objectivity literally cannot exist.
Think about it this way: If someone reports an event and chooses to leave, quite literally, any detail out of the story, and I mean ANY detail, the story automatically becomes subjective. When a reporter knows that an ant has been swept up into a tornado and the reporter decides to omit this fact from the story, the story becomes subjective since the reporter has deemed this fact "irrelevant." On a large scale, the ant story may indeed be irrelevant but for the reporter to assume that he or she is still being "objective" is pure folly. Why does the reporter get to decide what is important to a story and what is not? While it makes sense to omit such information, the truth is that the reporter has omitted a fact. Period. The fact has been edited out. Which now turns this and ALL other stories into, drumroll please, EDITORIALS!!!
And along this line of thinking is the choice of words a reporter uses to report "facts." Reporters often soften language when they have to deal with a subject that they favor.
For Instance:
When an NPR reporter decides that she will report that Michael Kennedy, a member of THE Kennedys, reportedly had an "affair" with a fourteen year old baby sitter rather than report that Kennedy was accused of pedophilia, that reporter has made an editorial choice. An editorial choice that would NEVER be applied to someone that she didn't sympathize with politically.
Acts like this have eroded the credibility of the media over the past, I would say, seventy years or so. The pace of the erosion of the mainstream media has accelerated exponentially since the mid eighties to early nineties. Obviously, the rise of talk radio (thanks to Reagan's scrapping of the idiotic Fairness Doctrine, [a governmentally imposed view of what was "fair" and what was "not fair" in broadcasting) and, more specifically, the rise of Rush Limbaugh, was the beginning of the end of the media's stranglehold on "The Truth."
From the victory of talk radio came the rise and overwhelming success of Fox News, a news channel that ridiculously branded itself as "Fair and Balanced" but presented every story with a Leaning Tower of Pisa tilt that veered to the right. Fox News managed to achieve ratings like no other cable news channel. Even to this day, Fox reigns over all the other cable news networks.
After this came, of course, the internet and then the phenomenon known as Over The Top (OTT) internet broadcasting. Newspapers faded, network news ratings fell, and the left saw their hold on "The Truth" sliding out of their hands while The Drudge Report, Breitbart News, The Blaze, and other right leaning news outlets sunk their teeth into the television and print markets.
A while ago, on Facebook, I posted that if Trump were to actually win the election, the mainstream media would be dead to many American voters.
Trump threw down the gauntlet to the mainstream media when he announced that he could "...shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter." The mainstream media stupidly picked up on the challenge and set their sites on destroying Donald J. Trump. While I do not think that Trump consciously thought of this as a calling out of the media, he, on some level, understood the significance of his pronouncement and waited for them to bring it on.
Trump's answer to the media was something that I have personally engaged in but was something that I never gave much thought to. Trump showed the value of the Almighty Double Down. Don't apologize, don't back off, don't do anything but double down and DARE them to come at you again. If they come at you again, TRIPLE down, QUADRUPLE down, but NEVER GIVE GROUND.
Little did I know that the Trump Gambit would pay off. The media scrambled to find anything and everything that they could find on him and spray it all over the place while Trump Supporters stood their ground. After numerous attempts to discredit Trump, Trump got elected. The bogus reports of Trump's forays into stupidity managed to discredit ALL accusations. From what I could find, more of the stories were false than true. It also didn't help that Trump spent many years in the spotlight and yet none of these accusations surfaced until he was nominated for president. The October surprise was not going to hold any water with Trump supporters as they have been watching the mainstream media destroy ALL of their previous heroes.
Just ask the average right winger about Herman Cain. The voters were not going to let the media take away yet another Republican nominee with their, the media's, shenanigans. The reason that Trump succeeded while others had not was because Trump took the media head-on and doubled down with every challenge. This is something that right wing folks had been wanting on for a long time and they finally found it with Trump.
With Trump's success comes the death rattle of the mainstream media. The once powerful media met its end because of their lack of forthrightness, lack of integrity.
Paul Harvey, may he rest in peace, would have survived this onslaught.