In This Election, The Media Have Shown They Have the Power -- to Embarrass Themselves
Holy smokes. Were the Clintonistas looking for positive coverage, or someone to take dictation?
The media can't make up our minds whether we want to be a fly on the wall, or a player on the field.
One minute, we cover the news; the next, we are the news. One minute, we're incognito; the next, we're in your face. One minute, we're pretending to be fair; the next, we're dying to tell you how we really feel.
The joke is on Trump. The media helped him get his party's nomination with millions of dollars of free air time. Trump loved the attention but he made the mistake of not spending enough of his own money on ads that made his case to voters. And what the media giveth, the media taketh away. Now that Trump is facing off against Clinton, all the coverage is negative. And the media are getting a perverse satisfaction from helping slay the dragon they created.
Recently, Vanity Fair posted an online article -- originally written as a commentary for the Poynter Institute -- that bragged about how The Washington Post and The New York Times have swayed the election. The headline: "How Two Newspapers Brought Down Donald Trump." Fellow journalists shared that article on Facebook, citing it as evidence that newspapers still have power.
There's the rub. One of the first things I learned when I started writing for newspapers 27 years ago is that, in this business, the quickest way for journalists to lose what little power we do have is for us to start believing we have it.
The truth is, in this election, we in the media only had the power to embarrass ourselves. And we did.
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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.
Copyright 2016 Washington Post Writers Group
