Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
I think the collapse of what we knew as the standard newspaper business model wherein there were definitive lines between news/editorial and advertising is a big part of the problem.
I know you're not comparing the overall media love affair Obama with the way Trump has been handled. Trump never gave anyone a thrill up his leg. Regardless, I'm sure I can find criticisms of Fox News on this site that I made during the Obama presidency. And it's a lot easier to dismiss something like the Washington Examiner than it is to dismiss CNN. I see things like Politico cited all the time as if they are unbiased observers of the American political scene.
I'll give you one really simple example of what I'm talking about. Obama halted immigration from Muslim countries and it was hardly covered. It certainly wasn't referred to by news organizations as a "Muslim Ban". It doesn't matter what your own opinion is on these policies, it should be obvious the coverage is different.
I think you have a rather romantic and historically inaccurate view of the objectivity of newspapers. Even in the context of reporting news, they just as often defined what was politically acceptable and unacceptable as they just reported the facts. Looks at any historiography about how different protests have received and failed to receive coverage for instance. There was never any kind of "Just the facts, ma'am" era.
I also think if you're taking journalism as a vocation seriously, your anger should correspond to the sources' ratings, not whether you yourself take said sources seriously. Fox News attracts more viewers than any other cable news source and inserts political slants into ostensibly standard news coverage more than any other channel as well, yet the objections about an abdication of Serious Journalism seem launched against them less frequently than anyone else. Apparently you get a pass if you insert slants into your coverage for a sufficiently long period of time? Likewise, there are plenty of conservative news sources that
do cover Trump with only glowing praise and had no kind of love affair with Obama at all. The mere fact that you yourself do not happen to consume such sources doesn't mean they don't count as part of the general press.
The Muslim travel ban is exactly one of the things I
wish the press gave Obama a harder time about (though I note this remains a bit of a false equivalence in terms of the legal justifications and actual policies). The same goes for all the sob stories of deported immigrants that have been appearing since Trump took office; I wish those kinds of stories appeared with the same kind of frequency from 2009-2016 as well. You seem a lot more bothered by the pass the press gave Obama than anything in the present though, whereas I think such policies deserve the fullest amount of scrutiny regardless of which president is pushing them and have little use for the simplistic idea that Trump's policies should be free from such coverage just because Obama's were.