On Monday, Donald Trumps war on the media took a ridiculous turn even by Trump standards when thepetulantpresidentspeculatedin a speech to theU.S. Central Commandthat the press was deliberatelytrying tocoverupreports of Islamic terrorism.

Its gotten to a point where its not even being reported, said Trump, who seems incapable of makinga speech withoutmentioning thedishonest press and touting the latestconspiracy theory he read on InfoWars.com.And in many casesthe very, very dishonest press doesnt want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.

This claim no doubt came as a surprise toanyone who has watched cable news in his or herlife and has seen how extensively the mass media reports Islamic terrorist attacks whenthey occurin the West which they rarely do. Trump, who is reportedly an avidwatcher of cable news, either has a very bad memory or is fibbing once again to take a shot at the media and push his Islamophobicagenda.As Benjamin H. Friedman, a research fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, remarked to PolitiFact (whichruledTrumps statement pants on fire):

Due to its sensational nature, [Islamic terrorism is] over-reported compared to other forms of violence and causes of death that kill more people. Media has a strong incentive to focus on scary political violence the aphorism if it bleeds, it leads is a sound business principle in news media, especially television.

One would expect Trump a reality TV starwho clearlyunderstandsthe importance ofratings to have a pretty good idea how the mass media works in America. In public, however, the president espouses a simplisticright-wing view of the press, portraying it as an all-powerful monolith that is always out to unfairly smear him and advance a sinister left-wing agenda. (Trump may believe this to a degree, but he has clearly been playing onthe rights ingrained distrust and paranoia.)

And thus, in Trumps mind, the press isthe opposition party, as his chief strategist Steve Bannon put it last month. It deliberatelyunderreports Islamic terrorist attacks whileoverreportingor manufacturingbad press, such as mass protests, hisslipping approval rating orpublic opinion polls that disapprove of his agenda.

In reality, the mainstream media, or the corporate media,is driven primarilyby business rationale and the profit motive, not some left-wing or liberal agenda. This is evidenced by themediasinstitutional structure, and the startling fact that90 percent of the media todayisowned and controlled by justsix multinational corporationscompared to 50 different companiesin 1983. These six corporations function, like all other corporations, to make profit. Journalists working for those companies report to their managers andexecutives, who report to presidents and CEOs, who report to owners or shareholders.

It was this business rationale that led the media to excessivelycover Trump during the primaries, and prompted Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, toremarkin early 2016 thatTrumps campaignmay not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS.

A Harvard Universitystudyconducted last June supported this reality, and found that Trump got the most coverage of any candidate running on either side during the primaries, and that the vast majority of it was favorable in tone. On theother hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wasnt well known when he began his campaign (and thereforewasnt a bigratings draw), received the smallestamount of coverage during the first half of the primariesthough coveragedid increase during the latter half of his campaign, as he became an increasingly popular figure.

Meanwhile,Hillary Clintonreceived the least favorable coverage of any Democratic or Republican candidate, and during the first half of her campaign there were three negative reports about her for every positive one. That was partly because Clinton undeniably came with extensivepolitical baggage, but italso discredits the right-wing narrative that the media was a propaganda machine for Clinton.

Besides reality-TV-style political campaigns, terrorist attacks and other calamities tend to bring inbigratings for news networks, which means Trump hasitcompletely backwards when heclaimsthat those in the media have their reasons for underreporting terrorism. In fact,they have every reason tooverreportand sensationalize terrorismwhich they do. Thissensationalism has resulted ina false perception ofviolence and danger, leaving Americansextremely fearfulofterrorismeven though theyremore likely to befatally crushed by furniturethan to die in a terrorist attack.

The kind of stories that actually go underreported by the mainstream media are usuallythe ones that portraycorporate capitalismor the American governmentin an overly bad light, or stories that may alienate clients who spend millions of dollars on advertising. In 2016, some notable stories that received very little mainstream coverage were the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in North Dakota, thenationwide prison strike last falland the U.S. governments continuedtargeted killing program.

It is clear that the mainstream media has some strong biases but not in the way right-wingers always complainabout. Media companies are generallybiased toward American interests and the economic system under which they operate. And whilethere isan obvious liberal bentonsocial issues such as diversity and LGBT rights (as there is in much of corporate America),there is just as strong a bent toward the right on economic and foreign policy matters.

President Trumps biggest pet peeve with the mainstream media, however, is not that it is politically biased but that it isbiased toward reality (at least on the stories that it chooses to report). Stephen Colbert famously declared back in 2006 that reality has a well-known liberal bias, but the comedian could have hardlypredicted just how pervasive falsehoods would become in the age of Trump. The new president lives in an alternative reality shaped by his colossal ego and his penchant for conspiracytheories. In less than a month, his new administration has peddled some of the most transparent lies in the history of American politics.

Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a lot of fact-checking and debunking by journalists. When the press does its job and calls out the president or one of his servile staffers for lying, Trump criesabout the dishonest, unfair, failing liberal media. Of course, the medias job is not to be fair and balanced when the president of the United States rejects objective truths and regularly embraces conspiracy theories. Climate change, for example, is not an opinion, but a scientific fact; and when someone calls it a Chinese hoax, this should be treated as the ludicrous conspiracy theory that it is, not another opinion that deserves fair treatment from the press.

In Noam Chomskys classic book on media, Manufacturing Consent, the MIT professor describes the American mass media as effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion. Since this was written nearly 30 years ago, media ownership has become increasingly concentrated, competition for advertising dollars has intensified (mostly due to the Internet) and the dividing line between commentary newsand old-fashionedreporting has become increasingly blurred with the invention of cable news and blogging. But Chomskys thesis remains highly accurate.

There has been no greater myth over the past four decades than that of the liberal or left-wingmedia,andTrump has benefited from both the myth and the reality. Not only did he receive billions of dollars worth of free publicity from the ratings-obsessed press, but he was able to scapegoat the same press and lie with virtual impunitybecause so many Americans have stopped trusting the liberal media (i.e., the fact-checkers). In a sense, then, the mainstream mediahas been Trumps greatest tooland when the next terrorist attack occurs andthe media amplifies it as usual, they willfurther help the president and his fear-mongering agenda.

See more here:

Trump's attacks on the press and how the liberal media myth has empowered him - Salon