On the last Friday night of 2017, the PBS NewsHour analyzed the year in review, which included a look at public attitudes toward the national media. Substitute anchor Hari Sreenivasan cited a Pew Research Center analysis and suggested Republicans opposed the press playing a watchdog role over government. Pseudoconservative PBS pundit David Brooks surprisingly suggested that media distrust is because the media won’t hire Republicans. (Well, not real ones, the kind that cause discord inside the studio.)
HARI SREENIVASAN: David, also, there seems to be a distrust in institutions of all sorts. You have got only about 30 percent of Republicans who believe humans are impacting climate change. And the graphic that we have up on screen -- 'Should the media play a watchdog role?" -- that was something in early 2016 that about 75 percent of Democrats and Republicans agreed that that was the role of the press.
And now, at this point — this was, I think, in May that Pew had this poll out — about 42 percent of Republicans feel that, 89 percent of Democrats feel that. You know, the president certainly adds fuel to this fire. I mean, he rails against the press, against the FBI, against climate science.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, you know, this is partly a media problem. We made ourselves vulnerable to this loss of faith among Republicans by not hiring Republicans. This used to be a working-class profession in which people in both parties — it has increasingly become an Ivy League profession for people with progressive political views.
And if you do that after a number of time, you are just going to lose touch with part of the country and they are going to lose touch with you. That’s partly shame on us, but it’s partly shame on Donald Trump.
Brooks briefly made a conservative point -- which is amusing, since the PBS hiring of Brooks (and before him, David Gergen) underlines his point. They hired as their "Republican" someone who deeply admires Barack Obama and rips Trump and Ted Cruz. Naturally, Brooks started suggesting Trump's media criticism is inciting violence, like in Kenya. What is this -- media violence "birtherism"?
BROOKS: It’s very easy for political leaders to take nascent suspicions and exploit them into tribal conflicts. We see this around the world, where politicians — people are living together in a place like Nairobi, a lot of different tribes living in the same place. They don’t have violence most of the time.
But when the electoral campaigns happen, the politicians come in and incite the violence, and it’s like setting off a spark. And Donald Trump is a genius at setting off these kind of sparks. And opposition to the media has replaced opposition to the Soviet Union in the Republican gospel.
That roughly implies that the conservatives see today's liberal media as akin to the Soviets, which is a caricature, not an analysis.
By the way, Sreenivasan miniaturized the Pew poll question, which was not just if the media should play a watchdog role. It was if "news media criticism of political leaders keeps political leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done." Pew might be suggesting the media criticizing corruption, or hyperbolic rhetoric, might improve government. But most Republicans said no, meaning they don't think the media stop what shouldn't be done. They often work to stop what Republicans want to accomplish.
