Commentary: The unbearable smugness of the press
By WILL RAHN CBS NEWS November 10, 2016, 6:00 AM
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commenta...election-2016/
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions,
we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain
anguish in the face of Donald Trump's victory. More than that and more importantly, we also
missed the story, after
having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism's great
moral and intellectual failing: its
unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there's be a winking "we did it" feeling in the press,
a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar
and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for
our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the
millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists
love mocking Trump supporters. We
insult their appearances.
We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It's a profound failure of empathy in the service of
endless posturing. There's been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from "heroin country" that read
like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the
assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it's
our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness.
What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel? (italics in original story)
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste.
We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You'd think that Trump's victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that's not how it works.
To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
This is just all a "whitelash," you see....
...That's the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they'll eventually shut up and get in line. ...
...As a direct result, we get it
wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions.
We can't even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too
certain that what we find will
serve to justify our biases...