I'm going to post a comment by Steve Long, retired physicist, because it appears to be a pretty objective one. It rises some serious concerns though.
To an objective observer, it is pretty clear that Trump is bombastically exaggerating and the media is insidiously minimizing. Trump's victory seemingly had a lot to do with a sizeable portion of the electorate simply disregarding the media's negative assertions about Trump. In all probability, that is due to long-developing disgust with the media's twisting of the news ("facts") by devious presentation techniques as a form of advocacy for political goals that have some undesirable side-effects ("unintended consequences").
The results are scary. I am not calling Trump "Hitler" or his supporters "Nazi's", but the same social forces that resulted in those things are being used as political tools in the U.S., today. The Germans clearly had some legitimate gripes about their situation following WW-I, and Hitler was able to use those, wrapped in nationalistic/racial "patriotism" to rise to power. Mussolini campaigned on “making the trains run on-time,” much like Trump’s infrastructure promises. The parallels are too striking to be ignored. BUT, the U.S. today is NOT Germany in the 1930s.
There are many legitimate gripes that the Trump supporters need to have addressed. And, there are many legitimate gripes that the Clinton supporters need to have addressed. The tragic thing is that they could BOTH be addressed effectively, IF we could work together to do it. But, BOTH political parties seem more interested in using these gripes to further their efforts to obtain/retain power than actually serving the citizens of all persuasions. Their tactics of challenging the ethics of each others’ supporters are tearing the country apart.
We on this discussion group have been seeing a small piece of this negative trend in dishonest rhetoric vs objective debate for some time. For example, it is nearly impossible to have an objective discussion on climate, because the participants get lumped into “sides” that are either “deniers” of change or “true believers” of non-validated models. People not willingly in either camp tend to keep their heads down, because speaking up gets them “classified” and opposed on the basis of the classification, rather than evaluated on what they really know and think and are trying to say.
The only solution I can envision to this problem is for the real journalist media to stop trying to compete with “social media” for “ratings” and, instead, provide a contrast by being (becoming again) a credible purveyor of objective news and discourse. Our Constitution gives the media special protection and status because we count on them to provide that social service. But, at this time, they are disappointingly lacking in their fulfillment of our expectations of them.
