ABC Trump/Harris event exemplified larger media rot             

Disney-owned ABC's Tuesday night show featuring Donald Trump and Kamala Harris illustrated as much about the hosts and the network as the candidates.

(I characterize it as a show, because it's inaccurate to describe as a "debate" an event in which participants are barred from addressing one another.)

Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis threw off any ethical rule they might once have honored. The pixilated manikens paraded meagerness of character, uncaring that millions viewed their malfeasance.

Fox noted "The pair fact-checked Trump five times during the heated 90-minute event and failed to correct Harris a single time."

It was the newest portrait of a much greater wrong.

Overviews of current legacy media presidential-election coverage that do not at least implicitly acknowledge that body's bias against Trump should be avoided by readers desiring accuracy.

Many reporters dropped their note pads and grabbed up torches, years ago.

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

Some even openly advocate reportorial bias:

"Now you have Joe Kahn, the new editor or publisher, whatever he is at The New York Times, saying 'We're just going to cover this down the middle. We're going to cover what is,'" former Democrat strategist James Carville said on his podcast, last June. "I don't think that's the role of the news media when the entire Constitution's in peril. I don't have anything against slanted coverage. I really don't...F--k your objectivity!"

He added: "So, I think we need slanted coverage. More slanted coverage..."

Carville's comfort with skewed reporting recalls MSNBC-host Joe Scarborough's 2016 question: "How fair do you have to be when one side is just irrational?"

In August the same year, New York Times media critic Jim Rutenberg portrayed reporters' bias as legitimate. He observed that those who believed then-candidate Trump to be dangerous would throw away American journalism's "textbook" and assume actively oppositional postures. 

Remember, too, that during Trump's presidency over 300 newspapers across the country coordinated same-day publication of op-eds attacking him and his "Fake News" condemnations. Someone's ears were burning.

(Ethics were also trash-canned by liberals elsewhere: Democrat elites more recently contrived lawfare schemes against 2024 candidate Trump and strove to deny him ballot status in numerous states, while in the same moment proclaiming their party to be democracy's defender.)

The mainstream media's anti-Trump parading high-steps outside op-ed pages, where prejudices are legitimately articulated, and across theoretically straight news sections.

It is common for supposedly objective accounts to be larded with subjective verbiage like "extremist" and "threat to democracy."

(Meanwhile, the attempted assassination of the former president was promptly chucked into the news-hole.)

An unbiased press is crucial to maintaining democracy. Readers must trust that it will investigate all without favor and fully inform the public.

Only when voters have easy access to all relevant information are they able to chart their civil government's course responsibly.

That ideal is strangled when reporters and editors act as partisans, inserting their fancies between story and reader. By the doing, they cast down their proper role as uncommitted observers and take up the banner of event participants.

When TV news celebrities and inky proselytizers model fanatics' fashions, they fail journalism's noble mission and do not merit respect as advocates for the public interest.

But Disney's ABC would gladly add them to the payroll.