We have all witnessed the reality of liberal media bias over the course of a lifetime. A vast majority of eyes and ears in this country are focused on internet sites and media outlets where objectivity is optional at best. But this transparent one-sidedness did not reach its full crescendo, its apex, until the arrival of Donald Trump on the political stage. Only then would big corporate media dispense with all pretense of balance.
Donald Trump (Photo by Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Indeed, for decades big media denied their bias, trusting that their denial would be more believable than your lying eyes. Then, slowly but surely, they admitted it. And when Trump came along, they justified it. Finally, when he was elected president, they considered it a badge of honor, a patriotic duty.
But when Trump first appeared on the political scene, it didn’t dawn on big corporate media that he could actually win the 2016 election. By the time they realized they were wrong — and flagellating themselves for providing him with, by most estimates, some $2 billion in free media — it was too late to stop him. But, oh, did they try.
There have been countless examples of obvious media bias over the years. And in an instance such as this, when the elite sector of an industry is stampeding in one direction, it is usually difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint a single moment when the media’s forfeiture of journalistic integrity became inevitable. But with the benefit of more than five years of hindsight, it appears that there was indeed a ground-zero event when elite media received an offer they could not refuse from the granddaddy of them all.
On Aug. 17, 2016, the Old Gray Lady, The New York Times, essentially activated the permission concept for the remainder of liberal media with an article entitled “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.” Author Jim Rutenberg laid it down in the opening paragraph of a thinly veiled exhortation to his fellow travelers in left-wing media:
“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?”
That, my friends, is what we call a rhetorical question, one that answers itself. But the author responds anyway:
“ … you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.”
Rutenberg was all but inviting, if not beseeching, his fellow progressive journalists to set an entirely new standard for themselves. He was justifying the abandonment of the journalistic code and declaring that the patriotic thing is to mix opinion with fact to your heart’s content — because it’s all in service to what we agree is an indispensable effort to save the republic. And the publisher certainly knew this ground-breaking article would have great reach and impact, because it was in The New York Times, the closest thing to scripture on the left.
This conscious decision to discard any semblance of balance and depict Trump as a danger to the republic led to the advancement of false narratives deeply damaging to Trump and the burial of others that might have landed him a second term. In 2016, corporate media at first refused to publish the scurrilous Steele Dossier because they knew it was entirely unverified, but once BuzzFeed took the plunge and ran cover for fellow Trump-hating journalists, cowards that they are, they rushed to report on it secondhand. In 2020, they utterly refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was verifiable and, as a Media Research Center survey of swing states later uncovered, would have flipped the election in Trump’s favor had a news blackout not been activated by nakedly pro-Biden media.
Following the 2016 election, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, highly regarded in the journalistic establishment, offered something of a post-election bookend to the pre-election sentiments of Rutenberg and The New York Times: “We cannot continue the old paradigm – let’s say like over global warming – where 99.9% of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers. I believe in being truthful, not neutral.” And so began our daily dose of Trump derangement, which abated somewhat after the media succeeded in destroying his presidency, but promises to return with abandon if, as now appears more likely than not, the 45th president takes one more shot at the Oval Office.
The effort by legacy media to take down Trump at the cost of their own ethical standards, informally launched that August day more than five years ago, was so manic that no attention was paid, it seems, to anything beyond their blinkered, myopic, shortsighted vision of themselves and their self-perceived virtue. In their rush to destroy a candidate and then a president, did they even stop to consider they were discarding something of infinite value to their trade — public trust — that can never be recovered?
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
