The Mainstream Media's Big Disconnect: Why They Don't Get Middle America

[marmar]

The Mainstream Media's Big Disconnect: Why They Don't Get Middle America

Tuesday, 26 April 2016 00:00
By Neal Gabler, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed


To their everlasting discredit, most of the MSM Big Feet, which is what the late journalist Richard Ben Cramer labeled the self-important, pontificating political reporters and pundits who dominate our press, got it all wrong about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

That is no small thing when you consider those two are the big stories this campaign season. It's like a weatherman missing a Category Five hurricane. Of course, if a weatherman had blown that call, he probably would be fired. With pundits, getting it wrong never seems to matter.

To their credit, a few of those Big Feet have fessed up to their errors. New York Times columnist David Brooks, one of the most contrite, admitted that he realized he had been living in a bubble and had to get out in the country a bit more -- "change the way I do my job," is how he put it -- to understand the American psyche.

Brooks is right that a huge disconnect exists between the people who report on our politics and the people who participate in them. My own sense is that by and large political journalists are a smug bunch, but they come by it naturally. If they seem to have contempt for us, it is because they really do have different experiences and inhabit a different world from the vast majority of their fellow Americans. The most powerful of them -- the ones you read, see and hear the most -- constitute an elite so far removed that it could only understand us through the most aggressive sympathetic imagination.

And that is not going to happen. ..............(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35783-the-mainstream-media-s-big-disconnect-why-they-don-t-get-middle-america

[Trust Buster]

1. The voters decided. Not the media.

[bemildred]

2. Yep, I think the situation is becoming clearer now.

It's going to be Trump against Clinton in the general, and ugly as sin all the way to the end.

[OwlinAZ]

3. Either way, the country loses.

[bemildred]

4. A safe bet. nt