| This Campaign Isn't Trump vs. Hillary, It's Trump vs. the Media Michael Wolff, a longtime analyst of the media industry, writes in USA Today: Since the conventions, as [Donald Trump's] daily obnoxiousness and varied offenses against good politics continue, let me spitball that he gets 90 percent of the coverage to [Hillary Clinton's] 10 percent. It is the first time in a presidential election that it's good to be a non-entity. She doesn't even have to make her own case. It isn't even really a contest between him and her, it's between him and the media, on their own volition, arguing against him. Clinton is little more than an observer to the Trump train wreck and the media's hypnotic coverage of it. As a woman who has been hounded and excoriated by the media through her long career, she must be grateful for the reprieve. At the same time, it's hard to believe she doesn't find it a tad eerie. Nobody even notices the most hated woman in America. What's with that? . . . The result, by all appearances and polling calculations, seems to be that Clinton will walk into the White House having faced the least amount of scrutiny, criticism and antipathy of any major-party nominee in modern media history. This is the same Clinton who, after 25 years in public life, might reasonably have had a lot to answer for. Once Trump is dispatched, how does the media, suddenly realizing they did her work, regard her? The media was disappointed by the level of access to President Obama, too. The Justice Department subpoenaed the Associated Press's phone records. White House officials would call them up and scream obscenities at them if they didn't like the coverage. As the Washington Post put it in 2013: Reporters also have resented being bypassed as the White House takes its message directly to the public via social media, blogs and its Web site. Obama has granted few interviews to news organizations that regularly cover the president, going instead to soft-focus infotainment outlets such as "The View." Did the Obama White House ever pay a serious price for treating once-friendly media with such contempt? Eh, apparently not enough of a price to get them to change their ways. Certainly not enough of a price to deter the Hillary Clinton campaign from refusing to hold a press conference for most of a year. How will the media, suddenly realizing they did Hillary Clinton's work, regard her? Not that badly, I'd guess. The Inconvenient Stories That Don't 'Fit the Narrative' A lot of people liked this brief Corner post from Friday afternoon. Milwaukee erupts in riots that injure police officers, but it barely becomes national news. Louisiana is devastated by floods, but it takes a week for the national press to notice. The number of fatal overdoses has exploded since 2010. The suicide rate has increased by 2 percent per year since 2006, and hit the highest levels in nearly 30 years last year. If you view the national news media, based in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and a handful of other cities, as way too monolithic in its political views and driven by conscious and subconscious agendas, the half-hearted-at-best interest in these stories isn't that hard to explain. These stories aren't easily used to advance the narrative that Republicans are bad and Democrats are good. If a terrible natural disaster in Louisiana can be blamed on a Republican president, then it's one of the biggest stories of the decade. If the lack of a public statement on a Louisiana disaster during a presidential vacation might reflect badly on a Democratic president, it's best to treat the flood as a "page A4″ story, check-the-box journalism. A paranoid schizophrenic shooting a Democratic Congresswoman in Tuscon warrants national conversation on whether the Tea Party's rhetoric is inherently inciting to violence, and whether gun owners as a whole represent some threat to their fellow citizens. But an illegal immigrant shooting a young woman in San Francisco offers no further explanation or discussion, no need for a national conversation on whether a "sanctuary city" might protect dangerous criminals. A racist madman shooting up a Charleston church group indicts all Southerners, but the twisted cruelty of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell is just a "local crime story." If there really is a giant and widening cultural gap between America's elites and the rest of the citizenry in "flyover country," how much of it is driven by narrative-minded journalism? If you die in a particular way that can advance the Democrats' legislative agenda, your death is going to be an enormously big deal. If the circumstances of your death are politically inconvenient to the Left — Brian Terry or the Benghazi four or those who died on the waiting list for the VA — there are no greater lessons to be learned or need for further action; it's just an unfortunate set of circumstances. One set of citizens are in the picture; one set of citizens on the periphery get cropped out. It just doesn't fit the picture that someone wants to create. Hopefully this comes across as a little more complicated than just complaining, "the media are biased." The national media, as defined by the news networks, largest newspapers, newsweeklies, cable news networks, and news radio, have a collective worldview. That worldview likes to spotlight and give in-depth coverage to particular kinds of stories — perhaps better to say "narratives." If a story contradicts that narrative, the media as a whole will rarely ignore it completely. It will just get "check-the-box" journalism, the five-paragraph wire service article on page A4. But when something comes along that confirms one of their preferred narratives, it becomes a multi-day story, generates opinion columns and "think pieces" and essays and house editorials and spurs calls for a "national conversation." The media has decided this news story has an importance and meaning that goes far beyond the particular event, and should shape how its audience sees the world. I'll bet right now you can think of some of those narratives. A few that immediately come to mind: - A white cop shoots a black teenager, stirring racial tensions and concerns that the police are unfairly profiling African-American youth.
- A mass shooting indicates that gun owners may present a lurking, deadly threat to their communities.
- This violent anti-abortion protester demonstrates the hypocrisy of a movement calling itself "pro-life" and reveals a hateful misogyny is what really drives their beliefs.
- This Woman/African-American/Latino/Asian/Gay/Lesbian/Transsexual is the first Woman/African-American/Latino/Asian/Gay/Lesbian/Transsexual to achieve this particular act, and thus marks an important milestone and turning point in American life, worthy of salute and celebration.
- This terrible environmental catastrophe shows why we need a stronger Environmental Protection Agency. (Even when the EPA is the actual cause of an environmental disaster, media voices on autopilot will portray the EPA has just trying to help and Tea Party activists to be the real problem.)
Some news events don't particularly help either party or any particular ideology; this doesn't mean they aren't big news or worthy of the public's attention. Or those events can have multiple factors and problems can require more than one solution. The explosion of opioid addiction and suicides could point to insufficient funding for treatment programs or publicity for suicide hotlines, or it could point to fraying community ties and familial bonds, the kinds of connections and support network that our past, more traditional societies helped foster and sustain. Or both! The reaction to that Corner post is breaking down along the lines you would suspect: conservatives saying "hurrah" and those closer to mainstream media institutions scoffing, "Oh, pish-posh, you're comparing apples and oranges." The Shadow Self of Trolls This weekend, I noted that despite Time magazine's fearful cover piece, no, hateful trolls haven't taken over the entire Internet. Their cover piece laments the phenomenon, but didn't spend a lot of time exploring why people behave like trolls. If the troll isn't a troll 24/7, then how do we explain his actions? Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once described the concept of the "shadow self" — the darker, crueler side of a person's personality or nature that they usually try to suppress, to varying degrees of success: It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster's body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware. . . . The Internet offers users a relatively consequence-free zone to let their shadow selves loose. This morning I found the perfect Internet comment on a piece about the sorts of things that get said in the comments sections: "It probably never occurred to JG or Jung that people often enough just get mad about the very things that most people generally do get mad about. Arrogant intellectuals have always been one of them." If I'm an "arrogant intellectual" like Carl Jung, arguably the most influential psychologist of all time, I'll take it. ADDENDA: A glimmer of good news for the GOP: "Republicans have continued gaining ground in recent months in voter registration in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Iowa, while the late surge in Democratic registrations relative to Republican registrations that occurred in battleground states the final months of the 2012 election had not materialized in numbers released in early August." | 
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