Media vs. Trump: "It’s about legitimacy, of course, and what’s left of the respectable press is utterly captivated by the theme."

To begin your week with optimism and encouragement ... and whoever said the picture has to match the text?

The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that?, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

The news media needs to win its war with Trump, and urgently so. But the goal should be more than just reestablishing the old rules of legitimacy

These are the worst of times for the American news media, but they are also the best. The newspaper industry as a whole has been dying slowly for years, as the pathetic tale of the once-mighty Chicago Tribune reminds us. But for the handful of well funded journalistic enterprises that survive, the Trump era is turning out to be a “golden age” – a time of high purpose and moral vindication.

The pivot:

These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class. They are professionals and they believe in the things that so many other professional groups believe in: consensus, “realism”, credentialing, the wisdom of their fellow professionals and (of course) the stupidity of the laity.

This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.