Ben Smith, generally the New York Times’s most useful columnist, has a good one from this past weekend about the rise of Newsmax, the conservative channel that hopes to rival Fox News. But readers would have to pause when getting three paragraphs from the bottom.
That’s where they would find him describing Fox News evening host Tucker Carlson as “regularly” telling his audience “that the college-educated snobs in New York who preside over the major outlets view conservatives as unsophisticated rubes, misled by misinformation, not as people who actually believe in the ideas pushed by Mr. Trump, like immigration should be sharply curtailed.”
OK, yes, true. That does happen. But Smith goes on to brazenly claim, “Those attacks on the media are often false.” He at least allows that “The coastal media sometimes does fail to understand people who aren’t like them, left and right, and sometimes they patronize their audiences.”
But too much of that isn’t true. Way too much.
Those “attacks on the media” (such as you can call them “attacks” rather than “rules of law”) aren’t “often false.” They’re always true.
People who voted for President Trump and continued to support him throughout his term wanted very reasonable things: a secured Southern border, safety in the streets, and a government that didn’t hound them about our moral obligations to the rest of the world.
All of that, to the “coastal media,” was raaaaacist! (Can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve met at least a few black and brown people who want those things as well.)
Voters who wanted a border wall? Racist.
Voters who didn’t like seeing their public schools overrun by Latin gangs? Racist.
Voters who preferred the Black Lives Matter riots not invade their neighborhoods? Racist.
Voters who thought maybe we should be a little more selective about the type of immigrant we accept? Racist.
It’s hard to think of one thing Trump did in office that wasn’t called racist, other than appointing Jerome Adams, a black man, to be surgeon general. And even he was described in the media as insensitive to racial issues!
That the media hold contempt for conservatives and right-leaning independents has been true for decades. The Trump era only made it undeniable.
