EDITORIAL: Consensus in a bubble

OPINION:

Throwing rocks at the newspapers and television networks, however much many of them deserve to take a big one squarely on the snout, is a fool’s game. Never pick an argument, as the saying goes, with a man who buys ink by the barrel.

Nevertheless, the minions of the media — who were collectively called “the press” in the golden age of journalism — are digging themselves ever deeper into the swamp of public contempt and nearly unanimous calumny, and they’re oblivious to what they’ve done and how they did it. They have become one large collective cliche, not a conspiracy, but worse, a consensus in a bubble.

Polls invariably show that editors and reporters, “journalists” in the pretentious term they prefer, rank somewhere between used-car salesmen and telephone marketers, and far below Donald Trump, in public perception and even admiration. Most people think “the members of the media” smell bad, as if they should be more careful with their toilet.

Donald Trump rails and rants at the press for their treatment of him, and like it or not, he has a point. There’s no attempt to moderate the fiery invective on the editorial pages of many newspapers, the stand-up commentary by the television correspondents or the sit-down commentary around a table. It’s as if the columnists and talking heads were writing and talking only to themselves, trying to impress each other. In fact, they are. Most of the minions don’t care whether the great unwashed public (and look who’s calling them the unwashed) read or listen to them or not. They rattle on with self-congratulatory tributes to their courage and bravery for speaking up to each other. Much of what they say about Donald Trump’s ego, his braggadocio and his ignorance of issues is correct enough, but what they take care not to say about Hillary Clinton’s greed, corruption and obliviousness to the honor of the office she seeks is true, too.

It’s difficult to fathom where this delicate media came from. How did an incestuous relationship with the Democratic Party come to capture what was a rowdy, skeptical and irreverent press and transform it into a partisan tool in the hands uptown elites? Indeed, in the golden age of newspapers the press was a trade, made up of men and women who gloried in their working-class origins and wanted no truck with “journalists” intoxicated with 90-proof blarney learned from a professor who could only put a reader to sleep.

It’s Donald Trump’s plain speech, his skepticism of the politically correct and his working man’s blunt and irreverent language that make him anathema to so many of the men and women who aspire to be well thought of by their peers, and who wear the contempt of the working class as proof that they have arrived at their destination.

Their protection of Hillary Clinton, their determination to make sure that her sins and shortcomings are never to be mentioned in the parlors where they long to be accepted as equals, is obvious to anyone who can read and watch. Donald Trump has fed every clich of the ruling class into the maw of angry discussion and put every platitude and banality up for reconsideration and revision. The outcome this time of the debate is less important than the dust he kicked up raising questions.

The internet that has sacrificed so much to the level of the common denominator has at the same time armed the unwashed, who are not likely to go away after this season of politics in the raw. The common man might prevail yet, whether the “members of the media,” as they grandly call themselves, like it or not.