If you’re going to fight and die on a hill be damn sure that hill is worth dying on.
30 Tips to Stay Married 30 Years, Today: #15 Carefully Choose the Hills Worth Dying On
In my 30 tips to stay married 30 years series (expanded to 32 tip 30 will be up later this week) that will eventually be a book I talk about the difference between something worth a fight (Do we move across the country?) and something not (Do you buy Tide or Gain to do the laundry?). Basically this bit of advice is about making sure that if you are going to risk something as valuable as your marriage you’d better be damn well sure that the reward is something critical.
This is advice that the press really could have used in the Trump era when it comes to their credibility.
Don’t get me wrong, for decades the press has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat left, and they have had unofficial rules in place to make sure that stories that favor the left were advanced and stories that favored the right died or were “local” (see Friday’s DaTechGuy’s Laws of Media outrage or that tag on the site for details of said rules).
Even so the media for a while , would still cover the odd Democrat scandal (perhaps mentioning the party in paragraph 8 or “accidentally” referring to the perp as a republican then correcting it later after the story had already played or allow a local subsidiary of a network to critically examine the left or would avoid pushing a narrative past the point of credulity.
This dramatically changed around the time of Barack Obama’s election, in fact one might say it changed dramatically when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.
As soon as this happened the media went all in. The thought of a young attractive woman governor on the GOP ticket with a knack for campaigning, speech making and a populist streak was too big a danger to be ignored, particularly when for a short time after that pick McCain managed to pull ahead of Obama. No tactic was too low, no charge too outrageous and no boundary of propriety was left unviolated.
This was at the same time that the Rev Jeremiah Wright was being memory holed.
During the Obama years it was again all in, No action of Obama’s was to be critiqued, no scandal to be examined (the idea of it being a “scandal free administration was pretty much that they were free to behave scandalously without fear” It got worse with the rise of the tea party and when our Embassy were hit and our people killed in Benghazi they attacked Mitt Romney the GOP candidate for commenting on it rather than the President who left people to die. More and more the media seemed willing to drop it’s mask of “objectivity”
But even this was paled by their reaction during the 2016 campaign when Clinton was propped up and Trump was 1st uplifted when they thought he would hurt the Republicans and then excoriated when he won the nomination. The media didn’t bother to pretend it didn’t take sides and some journalists openly declared that it was time to do so.
Unfortunately for the Donald Trump comes from the Jacksonian school and rather than play nice publicly and repeatedly called them out it. They were made a laughing stock to the point where trust in the media is about as low as you can get.
Which brings us to the Tara Reade situation.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Tara Reade case isn’t going away and that unlike the false accusations against Judge (now Justice Kavanaugh) the passage of time has produced more corroborating rather then exculpatory evidence.
If the media had the credibility it had in 1970, 1985, 2000 or even 2007, this would be the time when it could save the day for the Democrats. They could have taken apart the Reade story early or dismiss it as overblown. After all this is 27 years ago and they could (rightly) stress what would and would not stand up in a court of law. They could have used their ability to control the narrative to highlight every single exculpatory fact to make sure it was dismissed as a one day or at worst a one week story claiming there was nothing to see here.
Alas for the media and the Democrats, they threw away what was left of their credibility on Russia Hoaxes, Creepy Porn Lawyers and Crazies pounding on the doors of the Supreme Court, and with that credibility went their ability to kill this story.
Many years ago in the days before setup men and closer an elderly Ty Cobb gave a young pitcher advice to save his stuff for key moments of a game rather than pitch himself out when their was no need.
I’ll bet the MSM wished someone had given them that advice three years ago.
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