It ain’t rocket science

It’s been one year since Donald J. Trump shocked the world — not to mention the news business — by winning the White House. The recriminations have flowed like fine wine among journalists wondering how they could have been wrong about the biggest story of their career.

Easy. They’ve been missing it for years. No, not just the disaffected voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who tipped the Electoral College scales toward Trump.

Rather they missed the long-festering problem that created all those angry voters in the first place.

The American political system is corrupt, a government and political complex where money talks and BS walks. Where the concerns of Mr. and Mrs. Average American are ignored by the onslaught of advocates and lobbyists. And, sadly, the journalists who cover them.

The common complaint is that journalists have a liberal bias and it’s true surveys show a strong tilt to Democrats. Reporters on the whole are more likely to live along the coasts and their education patterns are far different from the men who pounded the pavements in search of crime stories during the romantic good old days.

But I’ve long believed journalists are truly biased toward conflict. And as the profession continues to be dragged down by by the failure to adapt to changing technology, the need to generate clicks really isn’t that far off the old charge of reporters just trying to sell newspapers.

And while for the most part the industry remains committed to truth (excluding Fox, Breitbart and the truly ideologically committed conservative media), that survival instinct has gotten into the way.

As has the cold hard reality that while the media loves to tell truth to power, the higher up that food chain one climbs the closer you get to power. And the intoxicated air that comes with it.

As a Massachusetts Statehouse journalist in the 1980s I experienced that personally. The state’s economy was booming, the governor was being touted and eventually ran for (and lost) the presidency and then returned to a Miracle that dissolved into a Malaise.

I was in the middle of that maelstrom daily and while my (first-in-the-industry to fall on financial hard times) wire service didn’t lead the coverage I woke up just about every morning knowing what the lead story was going to be. A heady brew to be sure.

It’s that regular immersion in the day-to-day of governing (and politics) that allows journalists to develop blinders. That’s especially true today with the massive infusion of cash that powers the system under First Amendment guarantees of free speech (campaign advertising) and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances (lobbying).

American politics, particularly at the national level, is drowning in an ocean of cash that has created a government of, by and for lobbyists. And to mix metaphors, journalists can’t see the forest of dark money for the trees nourished by that cash.

Their readers and viewers, particularly those in what coastal elites often refer to as “flyover country” sure can. And as the fictional Howard Beale once famously intoned they are “mad as hell and won’t take it any more.”

Enter Donald Trump. Master salesman (if not businessman)with a knack for controlling the news cycle. From his descent down the Golden Escalator in Trump Tower, he had the message for those angered by Washington’s tribal political wars and the power and influence of K Street.

Building on the tactics he’s used in business and sweetened by his reality TV training, Trump gave the audience what it wanted. And network moguls gobbled it up. To the tune of billions in free coverage by early 2016.

Little attention was paid to what Trump once called “truthful hyperbole.” By the time the media finally recognized what was happening it was too late.

Now, almost 11 months into a term marked by little in the way of accomplishment save for a Supreme Court justice, some of Trump backers are wavering. But a solid minority remain on his side because of the less-than-subtle permanent campaign he has been waging to stir up racial, gender and class resentments.

Not to mention his attacks of the “enemy of the people” news media that ironically put him where he is today.

Those core loyalists are fueled by those attacks on a media establishment they hold in as much disdain and they perceive the press corps shows toward them.

The irony is that number holds steady or grows even after the media finally wised up to what it had wrought and began to cover the campaign and administration as it should have since Day One.

That’s led to solid reporting, backed by multiple if often confidential sources, that spell out the relationship between the Trump campaign/entourage-Russia relationship before and after the election.

But, as we continue to learn, that effort has been countered by a sophisticated disinformation campaign managed by Russia and focused on social media outlets that have provided an increasingly larger share of the public’s “news” diet.

So where do we go from here? It’s a hard question with no easy answer. The battle lines are drawn as tightly as they have been likely since the McCarthy era. The Trump camp’s campaign to discredit against Special Counsel Robert Mueller rivals that of Richard Nixon’s war with Archibald Cox.

Mueller’s indictments of one-time campaign chairman Paul Manafort and deputy Richard Gates and the guilty plea to lying by erstwhile campaign aide George Papadopoulos suggest prosecutors are heeding the sage advice of “Deep Throat” to Bob Woodward: follow the money.

Will Mueller have the same success? What will happen to Trump? How will his supporters react? What will be the media’s role be in this ongoing saga?

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. And perhaps the media will be an important player.

We can only hope.