the dialog from the WH is just raging anti-anything-liberal, it's not even consistent or logically sound (in the context of more traditional republican values)
This is what gets me. And there's no bully pulpit like that of the White House, so it at least seems to have overwhelmed expression or reiteration of those more traditional values. For that though I blame not only partisan media outlets like Fox, but also the center and left-leaning media who may have come down too much along lines of "but we have to cover this stuff."
Yeah of course they must cover the circus. We do need to be jolted out of our own busy schedules and priorities now and then by a glance at a gone-viral clip of exactly how nuts (or corrupt, or ignorant, or abusive) Trump and his crew are. This is a dangerously impulsive and malleable executive we have now in the Oval Office. He and his inner circle have merited a 24/7 watching effort.
But maybe the mainstream journos' editors could afford to leave far more of the "Trump Show" space for some remaining sane voices to the right of center.
In the end, no matter the ringmaster's attributes, the country's fate rests in execution of policy. Surely the press knows this.
We have all needed more summary-view but clear
explication du texte of the down-road impact of Trump's EOs at papers of record like WaPo and the NYT all this time. We could have used presentations given at least as much weight as three minutes analyzing Trump's latest rage-tweet? Not just 15 seconds of pro forma "If pursued, the ideas in this tweet could affect Main Street banking practices and maybe hurt consumers." Something like that goes in one ear and out the other. The focus remains on "HE said THAT to a CEO? WOW!"
With a little more attention to sane conservative views in this era, then it might not now be just people tuning into the Dems' convention who have been reminded of the thinking offered up by the likes of Sally Yates, John Kasich or Christine Whitman. Seems to me the media are not exactly phoning it in, but they may have been resorting to a half-assed formula of "oh Trump is so off the wall on this thing, must be time for another op-ed from a sane Republican, anybody get anything in over the transom lately? Get me somebody who was over at State from the Bush '41 era..."
I'm not a subscriber to some automatic algorithm of "fair and balanced" ... that was always nonsense even if it may have had some merit back in campaign seasons when most pols in both major parties who made it onto the little screen in our living rooms were sane and articulate. But if the press today have meant to cover Trump as a real president (v the reality show guy) then the media outlets of record in the USA need more consistently to have presented regular Republican views opposite some of his crews' outlandish assertions (not to mention their inconsistencies).
There's such a thing as letting a circus get out of hand. The consumer may always be right (although in fact that's not even the case) but that should not translate to responsible purveyors of news that it's okay to hand out only candy. We get hooked on it. We are hooked on it. What the hell are the media going to do when we get a president whose public pronouncements are about policy? It was and definitely now seems decades ago that presidents made sober if perhaps boring announcements on policy, and that media made careful if boring transcriptions of such news. Here Nixon, back in the day.,
"The legislation I have signed today extends and amends the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970 under which both the first and second phases of our anti-inflation program were launched. It provides authority for continuing these efforts through April 30, 1973. I hope and expect, however, that before that date we will see the end of the inflationary psychology that developed in the 1960's, achieve lasting price stability, end controls, and return to reliance on free market forces."
Great. We go back to seeing that on page one of the paper and media segment bankruptcies will ensue in months, eh? Our eyes glaze over much more easily now after four years of Trump's tweeted policy shift nutshells, never mind official signing statements.
The world of Trump has been far more exciting in the world of media coverage: a gusher of attempts to burn down a lotta barns, not only those of "the establishment" but the ways in which media even cover government and the ways in which Trump has been trying to discredit that coverage. Media have been hard pressed to cover all that and still leave time to reflect on what their own mission is. I grant any of them that. It's really hard to figure out what's worth covering and what is the potential cost to us of skipping some of it.
Still: some of us who are lefties were shocked to remember "oh yeah, she used to make some good points" on hearing someone like Whitman last night, and that doesn't really speak well for the press' grasp of their own options in a time of an increasingly autocratic government. Trump's guys have been gutting rules at the EPA and DOI since Day One in 2017. It shouldn't have taken a Democratic national convention nearly four years later to remind even those viewers, never mind the whole country, that there were once Republicans who were supporters of environmental conservation and protection.