But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It may not always seem fair to Mr Trump or his supporters. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century. The new rules set out in its Mediator column put everyone on notice:‘ you believe that Donald J Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes. The birth of ‘resistance journalism’ was announced on 8 August 2016 in the New York Times. Trump’s political rise signalled the end of this phony objectivity. God forbid we should attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes’ ( 1).When a presidential candidate was accused of involvement in some scandal, journalists would cover their backs by publishing stories calculated to embarrass his rival. ‘We journalists,’ wrote Ken Silverstein, ‘are allowed to go out to report, but when it comes time to write, we are expected to turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. The two sides largely agreed on most issues of the day: neoliberal economic policy, coups in Latin American, wars in the Middle East.ĭuring the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the media’s extraordinary complicity with the lies of the Bush administration prompted journalists to question themselves for the first time. The US media did have a political bias, but hid it by presenting both sides of any argument, so readers concluded the truth lay somewhere in between. The prestige of the New York Times was such that Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération all republished its articles in French translation or even in the original English. US journalists’ golf-at-3 lifestyle was supported by advertising (see The reader becomes king, in this issue) and their reputation for objectivity they were factual, precise and without explicit bias or excess, a model for the world. In Donald Trump, they mined a rich seam will his defeat mean the end of the boom? Something similar is happening to the US media today. This easy life was swept away by casino capitalism, all the more profitable because the economy was so strong at the time. Before deregulation, US banks followed the 3-6-3 rule: managers paid 3% interest on deposits, lent money at 6%, and played golf from 3pm.

...and the circus leaves town rar