Who watches the watch?

If you are someone who’s been put on edge by the tone of the past few posts, hang in there, I’m about to change gears. I have some choice words to say about the liberal media and the way they have been handling themselves lately.

It came to a head when I opened an article on USA Today which started with the phrase “…on an otherwise quiet Saturday for the president-elect” and went on to discuss a statement which Trump had released in a tone which was obviously meant to congratulate him for having only said a few controversial things that day.

What?

I may have been gone from the land of media and free press for a while but last I checked it is unprecedented to adopt a “0 days without incident” policy with the president elect. – Let’s ignore for a moment that I’m still waiting for the day when the number of days hits five – who do you think you are helping, USA Today? Donald Trump won – and at some point the media is going to have to suck it up and accept that fact and treat him like any other politician who has ever won office. This man is going to be the president of the most powerful country in the world, we’ve had a month to adjust to that fact, now it’s time for the media to start treating him with the weight and respect that that office demands. Because, let’s face it, they were the ones who put him there in the first place.

 

Full disclosure, I’m feeling a little fed up with the media this week. Living through the firestorm of Fidel Castro’s death here in Cuba back to back with news coverage of the elections in the US has made me aware of some of the gray areas of journalism which my professors skimmed over.

Specifically the media’s seeming inability to take a situation seriously.

Now I know the Trump supporters out there are tired of me drawing parallels between them and Fidel, and I’m sorry, I promise I’ll stop – but just this last time I think it’s incredibly apropos. As a temporary Fidelista I tried staring down the foreign media for a week and it helped me understand how it must have felt to be a conservative in America for the past year.

Watching the CNN camera crew wandering around the crowd at a candlelight vigil I suddenly realized that none of the foreign media present in Havana right then were even going to try to understand what it might be like to be a Cuban at a moment like this. When the news of Fidel’s death came out, all of the television channels and newspapers in Cuba immediately switched to showing photos of Fidel and histories of Fidel – memorializing him forever. But the foreign media would never even think of “contaminating” their “objective coverage” with the Cuban response. And that is partially justified, but at the same time what is the point of reporting from Cuba if you aren’t going to let Cuba into your reporting?

I believe this high castle approach to journalism is the fundamental flaw in the media, and it’s what got us into the political mess we are currently in. The cornerstones of journalism are objectivity and bipartisanship, but we all know those are impossible to achieve. The Cuban media comes right out and says it. They put “This newspaper was printed by the communist party” on the top of every edition of the Granma – along with a picture of Fidel and a crowd of rebels thrusting AK47’s in the air. Of course there ought to be more than one viewpoint present, but at least Cuba admits it’s not fooling anyone.

And much like the Granma, the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN got far too comfortable with being the only “acceptable” voice in American culture. They got far too used to being in power, to being politically correct, to being unassailable. And so they didn’t even bother to understand what a movement like Donald Trump might mean for America. Instead, they decided to turn it into a political spectacle. And no one enjoys feeling like a spectacle. No one likes having to defend themselves to an invisible audience over and over, especially when they know that the invisible audience has no intention of trying to understand them.

And so Donald Trump won. Because the media, the liberal media, refused to take him seriously.

Which is why reading the phrases like “on an otherwise quiet Saturday for the president-elect” makes me want to slam my computer shut in frustration. After spending a month in flabbergasted shock and dismay, CNN and USA Today refuse to stop playing the game. They continue to turn the Trump transition team into some circus side show instead of the serious political act that it is. And if something isn’t enough of a spectacle they remind you of how unusual that is and somehow manage to turn normalcy into lunacy.

And I’m sick of it. Living outside of the news stream for four months does wonders for your clarity of mind. And living in Cuba for four months reminds you how dangerous it is when the media is in power.Thankfully the media is now squarely out of power for the next four years, and hopefully it realizes that soon and gets back to work because there’s a lot to be done.

We need a press corpse  which is willing to look around and see what is happening instead of seeing what it wants to see.

We need journalists who are willing to understand and present both sides of an issue.

And we need the media as a whole to stop being hawkers at a freak show and start being serious commentators of our nation’s history.

At least, that’s what I intend to do.