How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley

Mr. Sulzberger, delighted to be rid of Mr. Irvine’s disruptions at shareholder meetings, ignored Mr. Frankel’s objections, Mr. Frankel recalled in a telephone interview.

“Punch was for peace over everything,” he said. (Perhaps not everything: Mr. Sulzberger, after all, did publish the Pentagon Papers.)

But the publisher’s hopes that courteous meetings and friendly correspondence would placate Mr. Irvine — who would spend his later years spreading the wild conspiracy theory that an aide to President Bill Clinton, Vince Foster, was murdered — did not come to pass. “History shows that that’s not how this game works,” Mr. Perlstein told me.

Instead, the access emboldened Mr. Irvine, taught others to imitate him and helped push American political journalism into a place where the goal was sometimes to balance the complaints of competing sides as much as to report on underlying realities. The form of media criticism he pioneered has, in fact, become as central to Republican politics in the Trump area as any policy or grievance.

And liberals noticed the conservatives’ success and eventually imitated it, most successfully with the 2004 founding of Media Matters for America, which devoted much of its early energies to providing a new, leftward pull on the establishment media.

(The old establishment referees are now barely important enough to target, but they’re still embroiled in an internal debate over whether to try to hold onto a vanishing nonpartisan center. Some of those questions are playing out right now at NBC, where progressive prime-time hosts drive ratings on cable, but where the executive suite favors Nicolle Wallace, a former communications director for President George W. Bush and a Never Trump Republican. Two people familiar with the conversations told me that the NBCUniversal chief executive, Jeff Shell, had floated the notion of elevating Ms. Wallace to take over the prestige Sunday morning show “Meet the Press.” An NBC executive said the current host, Chuck Todd, “has led the Sunday news-making and ratings battles for five years at the helm of ‘Meet the Press’ and will continue to do so.”)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/business/media/trump-facebook-google-twitter-misinformation.html