To report or not to report. That is the question.

What is wrong with the liberal, main stream media? Why do they report what Donald Trump says? He lies all the time, he changes his positions to get what he wants in the moment, and he is powerless to act on his claims. The swamp is not drained, tax returns have not been shared, sexual assault accusers have not been sued, our infrastructure and health care have not been improved. Why do media outlets report the utterances of a person who does nothing but forward American Enterprise Institute approved nominees to the federal courts?

See what happens with the military at the border, with the caravan coming for asylum, with the citizenship right of babies born in the U. S. There will be no change in policy, but the liberal media report Trump utterances and claim he is trying to motivate his supporters before an election.

Thanks to their reporting, his supporters are motivated–not because of what they report, but because Trump supporters are riveted to Fox News, which reports how liberals resist the president. The main stream media believe they are protesting the president’s violation of political norms, but their reports legitimize the violations they are protesting. I love irony.

Do media outlets have a responsibility to recognize when they are being manipulated? Oh–I forgot–their primary responsibility is to get ratings that bring in advertisers. Reporting Trump utterances attracts viewers, so they report Trump utterances.

So, let’s understand that liberal media reports are not a form of resistance to the president. They are a form of profiting. The exact same point was made at the end of Bill Maher’s interview with Barbra Streisand on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, which aired on 11/2/2018.

I wrote these last three paragraphs on November 1, and then added the part about the Streisand interview. I also wrote them before I read George Orwell’s essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, where he wrote this about the English media in 1941:

Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

So, to answer the question in the first sentence—What is wrong with the liberal, main stream media?—they are tarnished by the profit motive. I love irony.