Russ Roberts writes at Medium:
The media is part of the problem. I follow a lot of mildy left-leaning journalists on Twitter who write for major publications and outlets. They are not fringe players. Their employers aren't either. These reporters aren't ideologues. They're just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. They have decided he is dangerous and a liar and they write about it openly on Twitter. They mock him in a way they didn't mock previous presidents who they didn't particularly like. They may be right about the dangers posed by a Trump presidency. But their stance which violates long-standing norms of their profession amplifies the feelings of Trump supporters that those supporters are under attack from mainstream American culture.
Here's a relatively benign but simple example. Trump says America is the most taxed nation in the world. ...when a member of the media tweets or prints a chart showing Trump's claim is totally incorrect, the chart reminds Haters of Trump that Trump is a buffoon and a liar. But it doesn't convince the Lovers of Trump. Instead it confirms their view that the media is hostile to Trump. And as the media becomes more self-righteous in its denunciations of Trump, the Lovers of Trump see this as confirmation not of Trumps idiocy but of Trump as victim and the media as the enemy of their friend.
Meanwhile, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, David Boaz, writes a post headlined, "In Defense of the Mainstream Media":
the mainstream media are our main source of news about the world. And for all the talk about the rise of conservative media, very few conservative media have reporters on the ground around the country and the world. The major media have "real reporters on the ground all over the world,...and a lot of what the right-wing media does is take potshots at those reporters and their reports, and that's fine, that's part of the checking process." But we should remember that the mainstream media "also serve as a check on overbearing, abusive government in the United States and other places in the world."
And that's why, I said, "it's really discouraging to me to see a president of the United States constantly denouncing the independent media and the independent judiciary as enemies of the American people, as purveyors of fake news."
