Thomas Frank, you will recall, was the progressive writer hired by the Wall Street Journal following the acquisition of Dow Jones & Company by News Corp. He was brought in to placate Democrats already on the staff at the WSJ. Mr. Frank became the face of liberalism on the editorial pages of the WSJ, but instead of presenting persuasive arguments for the Democrat agenda, mostly he just insulted conservatives.
He is no longer at the WSJ, but he is still in the business. And here he was at theguardian.com the other day calmly mansplaining to the msm about their efforts to bring Trump down. See The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that?. He gets the obligatory Trump insults out of the way right up front:
A recent Alternet article I read was composed of nothing but mean quotes about Trump, some of them literary and high-flown, some of them low-down and cruel, most of them drawn from the mainstream media and all of them hilarious. As I write this, four of the five most-read stories on the Washington Post website are about Trump; indeed (if memory serves), he has dominated this particular metric for at least a year.
And why not? Trump certainly has it coming. He is obviously incompetent, innocent of the most basic knowledge about how government functions. His views are repugnant. His advisers are fools. He appears to be dallying with obviously dangerous forces. And thanks to the wipeout of the Democratic party, there is no really powerful institutional check on the president’s power, which means that the press must step up.
But there’s something wrong with it all. ... It hasn’t worked.
It's a class thing. They are the privileged, and they know it. More from Frank:
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.
It's as if, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
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2:25 PM 7/23/2017
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