President Donald Trump talks to press, Tuesday, March 21, 2017, before signing S.422, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Benjamin Applebaum)
Mainstream media outlets have become increasingly biased in how they cover the news, as well as how they decide what to cover. If it doesn’t meet the liberal narrative, it will not be covered.
President Trump has hardly been discrete in his criticism of the media, but it is also notable that Trump has made himself far more available to the press than did his predecessor, as Jeremy Carl points out in NRO.
Mr. Carl, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, asks, is mainstream media the enemy of the American people?
I have talked to many journalists at “mainstream” outlets who insist with great sincerity that their only motive is to get the story right, yet their institutions consistently refuse to hire anyone who might seriously challenge the dominant views in the newsroom. If these newspapers’ editorial or reporting staffs were 20 percent, even 10 percent, made up of Trump supporters — keep in mind that the president won almost half of the vote in 2016 and has an approval rating north of 40 percent today — their news coverage would be dramatically different. But at the end of the day, protestations to the contrary aside, they have no real interest in doing so.
Ironically, while the media pearl-clutch about Trump’s rhetoric, their coordinated campaign against him today has used terminology far more incendiary than anything ever said by the president.
The organizers of today’s coordinated effort have referred numerous times to Trump’s alleged “dirty war” against the press. Far from a casual rhetorical flourish, the phrase “dirty war” is a reference to a period in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s in which the ruling military junta kidnapped and killed an estimated 30,000 overwhelmingly leftist critics of the regime. It is shockingly irresponsible, but incredibly revealing of their own myopia, that journalists allegedly lecturing us on civil discourse are equating some critical tweets and comments by the president with state-ordered mass murder.
Of course, the past was no golden age either. On the contrary, the days in which confirmed liberals such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather ruled the media roost from their monopolist position were far worse than today. The fact that confidence in the mainstream media has plummeted in recent decades is a sign of the health, not sickness, of our electorate. The Internet, though now under unprecedented attack as a free-speech zone, nonetheless provides a critical outlet in which conservatives can fight back against the mainstream media’s attempts to control our discourse.
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