Fiddler-In-Chief

In politics it's standard operating procedure to attack the media, if your back is to the wall just change the topic to the media is bad and dishonest.

A free press is necessary for the survival of democracy but now more than ever people are turning from traditional news sources to websites that traffic in fantasy and conspiracy theories or radio personalities that simply echo what their audience wants to hear. Many are accepting these false stories as fact and not bothering to take the few minutes necessary to discover the truth. Case in point are the reports that a lot of Americans are getting their information from Facebook. In their news feed they read a truckload of fake stories and take it as fact. Your news feed on Facebook is not the news, it's what your "friends" are posting and sharing intermixed with advertising and fake news sites deliberately spreading misinformation. The founder of Facebook dismisses this by saying we're not a news site, which is a bit disingenuous since Facebook has been pushing itself as a news source. When the social media site was originally launched they had human moderators monitoring for problems but now it's done by a computer program and really isn't doing anything unless enough attention points out an issue. To be clear, Facebook is not to blame, it's users are, if they take something as true and don't investigate with a few mouse clicks to see if it is.

Donald Trump believes that social media got him elected. He believes that his presence on Twitter and Facebook are effective communication tools and he's right. The other part of his success is about the failure of traditional media to take his candidacy seriously and to provide him unbelievable amounts of free air time. Trump brags about how little he spent compared to Hillary Clinton but in fact that's not quite true. The expert number crunchers estimate that during his primary and general election campaigns he received four billion dollars worth of free media. The media covered his events in full throughout the primary and gave his opponents virtually no time unless they paid for it. They did it for ratings and entertainment value and oh yeah, they didn't take him seriously. Traditional T.V. media and especially cable, let the country down. Now the media doesn't really seem to want to own up to their own failures.

Trump brilliantly played the media like a fiddle. He knew from the get go that he would get non-stop attention, he had been doing it for decades. Now he may be about to become an isolated figure who gives very little to the media.

The media is more interested in asking President Obama if he feels his views are responsible for  Trump's victory. They don't get it. But here's a fun fact from history, it is virtually impossible for a two term Presidency of one party to deliver a third consecutive term of that same party. Since the era of F.D.R. it's happened once and that was the 1988 victory of George H.W. Bush. That happened because Reagan was so popular that if he could have legally ran he would have won, so voters took the next best thing, his Vice-president. Bush was also up against a weak candidate in Michael Dukakis. There you go, isn't history fun and you don't have to take the word of a blogger for it, just pick up one of them there history books.

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