Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
bump!

My initial question (almost 3 years ago) has been answered. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter turned out to be important "news" outlets, even attracting trolls from foreign nations that wanted to manipulate opinions. They didn't care if it was left or right leaning, so long as it fomented internal polarity and chaos.

And now we have a POTUS that used his Twitter feed to call our free press the enemy of the people, almost like a test case. When that didn't get much push-back, he started shouting it at campaign rallies. When that got applause from the crowd, it moved from a meme to a guiding principle. Trump said, "What you're seeing and reading isn't what's happening"....it's all Fake News.

This is the natural consequence of the media being ridiculously biased. Once the lack of trust was created by their partisanship this was almost inevitable. And honestly the media deserves it, they made this mess. Journalists wanted to be news creators instead of news reporters. It is fine to be partisan but you need to announce it, embrace it and let your audience know. Up until memo-gate very few people realized Dan Rather was a crazy leftist. That's a problem.

One of the frustrating but possibly positive end result outcomes from Trump is his 'always strike back' approach. I thought it was absolutely idiotic during the campaign but I'm starting to see the pluses. If the media takes an unfair swing at Trump (or if we are honest even a fair swing), he'll punch back. And not always 'at the media' but call people out by name. If a media figure who tries to presents themselves as objective gets into a partisan slugging match with Trump they'll be stamped forever as having a liberal bias and lose half the country as a potential audience.