Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Angry Professor Eric Alterman: How Conservatives Manipulated the Mainstream Media to Give Us President Trump


Professor Eric Alterman reports:
What’s going on here is that conservatives are winning a war that liberals, centrists and, indeed, anyone who believes that politics should be tethered to recognizable reality don’t even know they are fighting. Racism and Islamophobia from outlets like Breitbart and the lunatic ravings of Infowars’ Alex Jones — which somehow make even Breitbart appear relatively reasonable — drove the news coverage of the election even in our most prestigious outlets. Twitter and Facebook were dominated by phony stories designed to discredit Clinton, and cable news, in its ceaseless quest for ratings and the advertising dollars that follow them, reinforced these priorities, allowing Trump surrogates to lie with impunity and without correction.
Who knew conservatives could manipulate the New York Times and CNN?