Trump VS the Corporate Elite Media:
Millions of Americans are
cheering him on
By
Jacqueline Marcus
According to a recent Gallop poll article entitled, Americans' Trust in Mass
Media Sinks to New Low, Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media
"to report the news fully, accurately and fairly" has dropped to its lowest
level in Gallup polling history.
Now consider the following observation made by Terry Gross, host of NPR's
Fresh Air, Gross asked her guest, Atlantic reporter, James Fallows:
Correct me if I'm wrong on this…only one daily newspaper wrote an editorial
endorsing Donald Trump, and several places that don't usually editorialize
wrote editorials opposing him…so you have the mainstream newspapers and
magazines taking a more emphatic stance against Trump than I have ever seen
in my lifetime…What impact did the press have on the election?
I know why liberals rejected a Trump presidency, but the question I kept
asking myself is: Why are the "establishment" mouthpieces at the corporate
press hammering Trump? You'd think they'd love a guy who boasts about being
an advocate for oil, gas, coal and "making the military stronger," as Trump
put it. It's the equivalent of asking: why are the big banks, oil, gas,
chemicals, weapon industries against Trump, including the corporate media
that is sponsored by these multibillion dollar investors? Why
are the old
guard Republicans so adamantly opposed to him? Why do the industrial
oligarchs, that have been shaping US domestic and foreign policy decisions
for the last sixteen years, absolutely fear and loathe Trump?
That question dogged me—after all when was the last time that the corporate
media elitists truly cared about profound moral issues, about working
Americans, or income inequality, or ending unnecessary wars, or climate
disruption, a question intentionally deleted from the corporate networks'
list of tabloid questions during the debates. I know why liberal Democrats
fear Trump, but I can't figure out why the establishment fears him to the
extent that, in addition to the mainstream media, many of the Bush
Republicans endorsed Hillary over Trump. I don't know if that did more harm
than good for Hillary but it did suggest that Hillary was a safe bet for the
‘powers that be' over an unpredictable Trump.
We didn't see it coming…writes a NY Times columnist, an assertion that
ricocheted in the media echo chamber after the Trump-train smashed into
their supercilious predictions on Election night.
A stunning repudiation of the establishment…
True enough. But as for not seeing the outcome of a Trump victory, I don't
know about you, dear reader, but I saw it coming. I saw it coming when
Bernie Sanders had an estimated 50,000 supporters show up at his rallies
compared to 2,000 or so for Hillary's rallies during the primary. In the
aftermath, we learned through WikiLeaks that Hillary needed help to fight
off the growing fire for Bernie, and she received it via the DNC that helped
to "tip the scales for Clinton" in the primary. As reported in the Observer,
"While Clinton received over two million more votes than Bernie Sanders in
the primaries, her candidacy benefited from the Democratic Party leadership
bending and breaking the rules to rig the primaries for her campaign."
Likewise, the corporate media did not report on the Bernie Sanders'
campaign. They pushed the "ignore" button, but the crowds kept coming for
the senator from Vermont. Instead, the press favored Hillary and they made
sure that she received positive coverage.
This gives you an idea on why the majority of Americans have a low approval
rating of the corporate media's coverage of politics and how the harsh
reality for most Americans is deleted from the reporting.
Americans distrust corporate media political analyses for a lot of reasons,
but the primary reason is that they know that network pundits don't work for
the people. To the contrary, they work for the very corporations that have
been oppressing the people. Americans distrust the corporate pundits just on
arrogance, alone. The message conveyed from the media is:
We are the experts! We know better than the average American voter, and
therefore, Americans will listen to what we have to say and they will be
persuaded by our assessments.
The established media strategy is as follows: If we criticize candidate X,
and praise candidate Y enough times, the result will be that candidate Y
will win.
Surprise!
So now the media pundits are scrambling for excuses: the polls were wrong!
The data was incorrect, never mind that they were in charge of conducting
the polls, which is also a game of manipulation of sorts given the questions
asked and the selected locations of polling.
Meanwhile, just like the Bernie Sanders' YUGE primary rallies, up to 50,000
at times, no one in the mainstream press acknowledged the
bursting-at-the-seams crowds for Trump. Or let's put it this way: no one in
the media chose to acknowledge those big crowds for Trump because the
extraordinarily large number of people defied the corporate media's
predictions. I saw the growing crowds for Trump but only on YouTube. The
networks never showed the record-breaking crowds for Trump and the long
lines of people waiting to attend the Trump rallies.
It's as if those tens of thousands of angry Americans who were fed up with
business as usual at Lobbyist Land, D.C., fed up with a long trail of
campaign promises that were either ignored or broken, fed up with the
escalation of poverty and the rapid decline of the middle class economy from
2000-2016, fed up with endless tax dollars for endless wars, and fed up with
President Obama and Hillary Clinton who continued to boast about Obama's
"legacy" when working Americans did not see substantial changes in the last
eight years.
In fact, Bernie supporters viewed the Obama administration's domestic and
foreign policies as a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies in terms of
expanding offshore oil & gas drilling in the US and spreading chaos in the
name of "regime change" throughout the Middle East region.
Reporters for the mainstream networks live in their own bubble of wealth and
prognostications. They're isolated from the real America that is in deep
decline for reasons that both Trump and Bernie Sanders alluded to: selling
our country out to the billionaire bidders without giving a damn about the
consequences of those decisions that benefited the few while American
workers were slapped with pink slips by the thousands as their jobs were
outsourced to cheap labor forces that oppressed the poor in third world
countries as well due to slave wages and labor conditions. Both Republican
and Democratic voters are angry about funding endless wars with their tax
dollars that are supposed to be used for our eroding schools, highways, and
diminished social services.
Once again, this leads to the ultimate question: Why are the
establishment/corporate media elitists so adamantly opposed to Trump? Do you
really believe it's because they're offended by Trump's impudence?
Think again. Maybe the oil and war profiteers are afraid that they'll lose
their power over military decisions at the cost of endless contracts worth
billions of dollars. Hillary made it clear that she was going to continue to
"arm rebels" in Syria. In short, the war profiteering business would
continue as it has for the last sixteen years under a Hillary Clinton
administration. She's a "safe bet". And so the corporate media backed her
every step of the way to the extent of brushing the WikiLeaks emails under
the radar. Is it possible that Trump could be a threat to the military
complex if he decided to shut down the Middle East occupations once and for
all?
Americans may not be able to say exactly what's wrong, but they know that
the country has been hijacked: the deplorable gap between the corporate
oligarchs and the middle-class economy that has been sinking like the
Titanic makes the obvious point. While CEOs of Wall St banks and the
profiteers of war sail off into the sunset on their $80 million dollar
yachts, catering to their hand-picked politicians, as they purchase new
private jets to match their new limousines and mansions, hard-working
Americans are scarcely able to pay for basic necessities; and that struggle
of barely scraping by is the new definition of the US middle class economy.
So when Hillary tried to argue that Trump is wrong and that America is doing
just fine, most Americans, including the author of this editorial, said,
"Huh?" Fine for you, Hillary, and fine for all your wealthy friends—but not
so fine with middle-class American workers.
Although Michael Moore supported Hillary Clinton, he got it right when he
said on November 8th that if Trump wins it's the equivalent of Americans
raising their middle fingers to the corporate elitists, and most of all—to
the mainstream political pundits who labored under the illusion that they
have the almighty power to persuade Americans through their own biased
methods of persuasion. It seems to me that a vote for Trump was also a vote
against the corporate media. It was their way of yelling FU to the
establishment.
Americans sent a message to the mainstream press: You don't have as much
control as you think you do over the American people. The voters made that
point exceedingly clear on Election night.
###
Jacqueline Marcus' second collection of poems, Summer Rains, was recently
published by Iris Press. Her first book of poems, Close to the Shore, was
published by Michigan State University Press. Her essays/poems have been
published in the Kenyon Review, North American Review, Antioch Review, and
more. Her selected essays on the oil industry, Man Cannot Live on Oil
Alone/Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us is available at
Amazon Kindle Books. She taught philosophy for 20 years at Cuesta College,
San Luis Obispo, California, and is the editor of ForPoetry.com and
EnvironmentalPress.com. She is a contributing guest writer for Truthout.org
Jacqueline Marcus taught political philosophy at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California, and is the author of Close to the Shore, (poems) Michigan State University Press, and Summer Rains (poems) Iris Press. She is the editor of ForPoetry.com. She was a contributing writer for Buzzflash/Truthout for twelve years.