Total humiliation of the media

Zach Schonfeld writes at Newsweek,

the biggest media trend of the year: total humiliation.

...For lots of high-profile media personalities, from Nate Silver to Nick Denton, 2016 dealt an enormous reckoning. Michael Moore made some startling predictions, but few other liberal commentators saw what was happening. Much of the pundit industrial complex spent the calendar year standing athwart history, yelling “It can’t happen here” or “Trump is going to pivot any day now.” Clinton lost. Pundits ate crow, took the L—choose your preferred cliché. One columnist ate his newspaper column, as he had promised to do if Trump became the GOP nominee. Some who got it wrong showed a capacity for self-reflection. Others, like Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, doubled down on their myopic pontificating or continued howling into their social media echo chamber of choice.

It was the year we realized that a lot of Very Important People who get paid a lot of money to know about U.S. politics have little more insight to dispense than the cab drivers they quote in their columns. Granted, plenty of normal people were wrong, too. But their faulty predictions weren’t recorded in national newspapers. Pundits who look back on their work might find a 16-month archive of headlines like “Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls.”

For Trump fans, it is thrillingly apt that the candidate whose rise to power blindsided the media is the same candidate who staked his entire campaign on bald contempt for journalists. Trump’s bone-deep loathing of the “dishonest media” might be his only coherent ideology. The president-elect routinely denounces the “failing” New York Times or CNN on Twitter and occasionally humiliates individual journalists by name.

...“A Trump presidency would represent a threat to press freedom in the United States,” the Committee to Protect Journalists warned in mid-October. One month later, Trump strode into the White House to meet for the first time with the 44th president, whose own aggressive war on whistle-blowers could enable Trump’s vindictive actions toward journalists.

Read more here.