Trump, the “Mainstream Media,” and the “No True Scotsman” Fallacy

The Lamestream Media is doing everything within their power to foment hatred and anarchy. As long as everybody understands what they are doing, that they are FAKE NEWS and truly bad people with a sick agenda, we can easily work through them to GREATNESS!” — Donald J. Trump, May 31, 2020

The ostensible fact that the mainstream media is in the tank for Democrats — and wants nothing more than to embarrass and overthrow Donald Trump — has been repeated so often in various echo chambers over the last three years that it no longer seems absurd to the people who say it. It is, however, fundamentally absurd for two very important reasons. In the first place, there is no such thing as a “mainstream.” In the second place, there is no such thing as “the media.”

Let’s break this down a bit.

The whole idea of a mainstream media is hard for anybody under 30 to understand. It is a term that describes part of a world that no longer exists. When I was growing up, we had three TV news programs (ABC, NBC, CBS), three national news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report), and a local newspaper or two. There were other sources for news, of course, but you had to go to some effort to find them. The vast majority of Americans got most of their news from these sources. That is what “mainstream”…