People were filing into caucus locations across Iowa, listening to speeches by campaign surrogates and getting ready to make their first choice known. Then their phones went off with news alerts: Donald Trump had won the Iowa Caucuses.
They hadn’t even voted yet. No one had. Instead, the media called it based on entrance polls, previous polling, and a desire to have done with the whole process, it appears. You can call this lots of things, none of which is journalism.
The official policy of the Associated Press reads, “AP will not call the winner of a race before the polls in a jurisdiction are scheduled to close.” They, and every network, called the caucuses not only before the polls closed, but before the voting had started.
Would it have made a difference? Not in the ultimate outcome of who won. But it could easily have affected the number of votes each candidate got. Trump might have gotten more. DeSantis might have gotten more votes, therefore, a higher percentage of the vote and possibly distanced himself further from third-place finisher Nikki Haley.
This is all conjecture, of course, but the reporting of the result before voting did happen. Every network did the same thing, with notifications of the call being sent out through every avenue.
Monday night contained many examples of how low political journalism has sunk.
MSNBC refused to carry any of Donald Trump’s victory speech, with Rachel Maddow explaining to viewers that carrying any of it would somehow threaten the left-wing network’s journalistic credibility. Sure, Trump stretches the truth, but he just won Iowa. Who is Maddow, and who is MSNBC, to deny an audience everything except pre-approved, out of context clips? That's the opposite of journalism — it is propaganda, the effort to reinforce a specific narrative and avoid deviations from it.
MSNBC was not sufficiently afraid for its credibility to keep its its prime time line-up from reporting the fake Russia collusion story long after it had debunked. But it is are terrified of its audience being exposed to information they don’t approve of. That could lead to questions, which could lead to people thinking for themselves. Then the whole house of cards would presumably collapse.
If you only get your news from them, MSNBC would seem like a broadcast from another planet. It’s the same for Fox, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. Both pick bits of stories and events to highlight their viewer — usually bits that actually happened, but any other news is shoved aside.
You have probably seen at least part of the painting “An Allegory with Venus and Cupid” by Agnolo Bronzino, without even knowing what it is or who he is. That's because, in the lower corner of the canvas, it features the foot that Terry Gilliam used in all those Monty Python animations to smash everything with a loud “ppphhhhhhtttt!” sound-effect.
You could have seen that painting a thousand times and not known that the Python foot had come from, or you could have seen that foot a million times and not known it was part of a larger painting, a classic.
Either way, that’s what our news media has become — a small part of the larger picture, not only with no effort made to illuminate the whole, but extraordinary efforts made to deny that the whole exists.
MSNBC's refusal even to show Trump’s victory speech denies its audience crucial context for the 2024 race. Their audience will see what they cut out and not the rest of the painting. If Trump is elected president again, one can only imagine what logical contortions they will resort to in order to avoid covering his inauguration.
The left, firmly in control of much of the national political news media has decided that Trump is Hitler. Their problem is that if people are allowed to see him speak, only to discover that he is not in fact Hitler, that could lead to those people wondering what other parts of reality the media are misrepresenting. If someone discovers there is more to a picture, they might want to see even more of that picture still.
Exposing the whole picture used to be what journalism was about, or at least pretended to be. Rush Limbaugh came along through radio, and later Matt Drudge through the internet, and showed the public what was on the cutting room floor. They exposed the major news organizations' misrepresentations and distortions of reality. Today, those media outlets have worked so hard to hide the context that they have created completely different worlds, insulated from the complete picture and from each other.
Where will the truth come from now? It’s unlikely to be from journalists, because journalism is dead; smashed by Bronzino’s foot: “ppphhhhhhtttt!”
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).
Political journalism keeps hitting new lows
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17.01.2024
People were filing into caucus locations across Iowa, listening to speeches by campaign surrogates and getting ready to make their first choice known. Then their phones went off with news alerts: Donald Trump had won the Iowa Caucuses.
They hadn’t even voted yet. No one had. Instead, the media called it based on entrance polls, previous polling, and a desire to have done with the whole process, it appears. You can call this lots of things, none of which is journalism.
The official policy of the Associated Press reads, “AP will not call the winner of a race before the polls in a jurisdiction are scheduled to close.” They, and every network, called the caucuses not only before the polls closed, but before the voting had started.
Would it have made a difference? Not in the ultimate outcome of who won. But it could easily have affected the number of votes each candidate got. Trump might have gotten more. DeSantis might have gotten more votes, therefore, a higher percentage of the vote and possibly distanced himself further from third-place finisher Nikki Haley.
This is all conjecture, of course, but the reporting of the result before voting did happen. Every network did the same........
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