The Trump Nail in the Media Coffin

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists.

What we know as “the media” never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.

No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.

Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to filter stories through left-wing lenses without much pushback.

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That old monopoly over the news, despite the advent of cable television and the internet, still lingered until 2016. Even in recent years, Ivy League journalism degrees and well-known media brand names seemed to suggest better reporting than what was offered by bloggers and websites.

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Yet the thinning veneer of circumspection that had supposedly characterized the elite liberal successors to Cronkite and Brinkley was finally ripped off completely by a media meltdown over Trump.

Journalists such as Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times and Christiane Amanpour of CNN said that they could not — and should not — be neutral reporters, given their low opinion of Trump.

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The WikiLeaks trove certainly proved another disaster to the media — but only because it revealed that mainstream journalists conspired with the Clinton campaign.

CNN’s Donna Brazile leaked possible debate questions to Clinton. One op-ed columnist, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, even asked Clintonites for research to help him attack Trump.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush sent a story to the Clinton campaign team to be audited before publication. He begged to keep his collusion quiet and admitted that he had become a “hack” for such journalistic impropriety. Thrush may have been rewarded for his predictable left-wing bias, recently being hired by the New York Times as a White House correspondent.

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After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the co-hosts of the show “CNN Newsroom” collectively put up their hands in “hands up, don’t shoot” solidarity — echoing a narrative of police murder later proved to be completely false by a lengthy federal investigation.

Decades-long journalistic one-sidedness was apparently tolerable when there were no other news alternatives. Mainstream-media monopolies once were also highly profitable, and long-ago liberal news people were at least well-mannered.

All of those assumptions are no longer true. News outlets such as The New York Times and NBC have no more credibility than most websites or the National Enquirer.

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