'The news is what we say it is'
mainstream media embraces bias as virtue


Any overview of mainstream media presidential election coverage that does not at least implicitly acknowledge that body's pronounced bias against Donald Trump should be disregarded by readers pursuing accuracy.

Reporters, in the main, long ago dropped their note pads and took up torches.

This is cowards' warfare in which slurs, misinformation, and scantily-veiled Democrat talking points are hurled from the cover of computer-stuffed offices and milling pool-swarms, and where innocent interviews can be deceitfully resculpted into misrepresentative silhouettes with the schemed flick of a tape editor's wrist.

In his 8/21 New York Post column, Michael Goodwin wrote that, "The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America...The largest broadcast networks - CBS, NBC, and ABC - and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the oval office has no precedent."

Goodwin hardly overstated the problem. Nor was he alone in seeing it.

That same month, Justin Raimondo penned an LA Times essay on that corrupt business. "The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat, and in playing this role they've lost the ability to assess events rationally."

Inebriated by unmoderated self-righteousness, numerous press voices have in recent days openly advocated reportorial bias as a positive virtue:

Univision's Jorge Ramos, writing in the 8/23 Time, lectured that for "journalists, politicians, voters...neutrality is not an option." 

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times media writer, cast it all as somehow a morality question. "If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?,,,you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the last half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you've never approached anything in your career...You would move closer than you've ever been to oppositional...But the question everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don't, what should take their place?"

Rutenberg doesn't entertain the option that non-opinion journalists so firmly wed to extremely partisan perspectives that their reporting may be tainted be transferred to different stories. Nor that anyone "grappling" with doubts about objectivity as a standard should instead pursue a public relations career. 

Political bias, per Rutenberg, is not to be criticized as disserving journalistic enterprise - and the public - but instead championed as moral apotheosis.

(Rutenberg himself notes another instance of a media figure advocating bias. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked a press performance question predicated on subjective derogating: "How balanced do you have to be when one side is just irrational?")

The mainstream media's unabashed pro-Hillary parading high-steps outside op-ed pages, where prejudices are expected, and across ideally straight news sections.

A July Harvard study found that coverage of Trump had shifted from majority positive during Republican primaries to majority negative after the general election season was underway, 

And specific examples of media bias in favor of Clinton and against Trump are numerous; notable, glaring instances can be found here http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-raimondo-trump-media-bias-20160802-snap-story.html, here http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/16/cnn-says-trump-bashing-the-media-is-like-saddam-hussein-destroying-democracy/, here http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/08/liberal-media-promotes-veiled-death-threats-trump/,
and here https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/media-bias-of-the-day-8-5-2016.

Several state and national polls record Trump leading Clinton, sometimes by decisive margins. That would indicate public opinion in favor of his ideas and proposals. 

But the press, undeterred, continues force-pumping artificial oxygen into the sickbed candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Reporters seem to share her smug, condescending dismissal of tens of millions of Americans as "deplorables," not meriting serious regard by their sniffing betters. 

Unsurprisingly, given the media's chin-raised and haughty malpractice, only 32% of the public has a positive view of it, according to a recent Gallup poll. 

An independent press free from even a hint of bias is crucial to maintaining credible democracy. Readers must trust that it will investigate without favor and fully inform the public. Then, having reached conclusions based on consideration of all relevant information, voters are equipped to chart their civil government's course responsibly and to their preference.

That is the ideal. But it is effectively strangled when reporters and editors act as vested partisans, inserting their fancies between story and reader. By the doing, they cast down their proper role as objective observers to take up the gaudy banner of story participants.

(And no, this is not Hunter S.Thompson-styled Gonzo Journalism. Just old-fashioned unethicalness.)

Cable news celebrities and inky proselytizers, having publicly doffed their profession's traditional principles and modeled instead the flimsy fashions of the fanatic, no longer deserve respect as advocates for the public interest. 

The mainstream media's enthusiastic political slant is so strikingly exercised as to be obvious to all with eyes. And it is inconceivable that it will ever again be trusted by fair-minded citizens.

There does have to be a morning after.


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