The media implosion continues

For over four decades, the media have created and in turn destroyed politicians (especially Republicans).  The result has been timidity and a necessary deference paid to members of the Fourth Estate.  Indeed, since the takedown of Richard Nixon, the media have been drunk with perceived power, ever looking for their next victim.

With the progressive monopoly on journalistic education, it is almost impossible to find a centrist, much less a conservative, at major news networks or newspapers.  When David Brooks of the New York Times passes for an in-house conservative, not much more needs to be said.

When it comes to the power of the media, however, Donald Trump seems to be the exception to every rule.  He has parlayed a career as a builder and a developer into a cash cow reality TV program (The Apprentice) and now, based on name recognition, a keen understanding of middle-class America, and ability to harness the new media, into the highest office in the land.

Initially promoted for the Republican nomination by a media believing him a sure bet to lose to Hillary Clinton in a landslide and take Republican control of the House and the Senate with him, he shocked all but his most ardent supporters with victory.

Not since Ronald Reagan has a Republican presidential candidate been so reviled by the press and feared by the left.  Like Reagan's, Trump's election was made possible in part by running against or following the worst president in the lifetime of most voters.  The Democrats provided in Barack Hussein Obama a president who was more clueless and anti-Semitic than even Jimmy Carter.

Like Reagan, Trump could bypass the media and take his message directly to the American people, who responded to a carefully choreographed campaign in the states necessary to carry a significant electoral majority.

Unlike Reagan, Trump had the advantage of the maturing alternate media.  Beginning with talk radio (Rush Limbaugh in 1988) and the internet, news was no longer a progressive near monopoly.  The Drudge Report, Breitbart, and a host of other conservative websites had become a significant source of news and opinion, even if traditional conservative sites like National Review and American Spectator made fools of themselves as #NeverTrumps.

And then there was Twitter.  Never had a presidential candidate caused so much consternation with so few and often intemperate words as did Donald Trump with his Twitter account.  And as the media, Democrats, establishment Republicans, and the entrenched bureaucracy raged, Middle America – that had been quietly seething for the past eight years – cheered.

Even the quadrennial "October Surprise" – in this case, a timely leak to the Washington Post by a staff member of NBC's Today Show, in which Billy Bush goaded Trump into a crude locker room-type conversation – was unable to derail the "Trump Train," though it caused no doubt many an ulcer.

As a result, on January 20, 2017, Donald Trump became president.  And while Hollywood raves, Democrats obstruct, and establishment Republicans cower, the news media implode.  They didn't create the Trump phenomenon, as Rush Limbaugh explains, and they can't destroy it.  To Trump's loyal base of voters, they are simply the "dishonest media."  All Trump-bashing all the time, and yet, depending on the poll, the president's approval holds steady at about 50%.

Through it all, we America-loving conservatives can enjoy the spectacle of Democrats makings fools of themselves and the biased, leftist media imploding all over our television screens and newspapers.  It doesn't get better than this.

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