The media are a collection of well-funded outlets that set the agenda, narrative, tone, and focus of coverage while conspiring with a major political party.
Reporters don’t ‘openly’ collude with Democrats (well, most of the time they don’t), they merely share the same objectives and set of values. This wasn’t a problem created by Trump’s emergence. It’s problem that’s been festering for decades.
Why don’t Republicans trust the media’s reporting on Trump, you ask? We spent three feverish years chasing the Russia-collusion whale, an imaginary beast created by Democratic Party operatives and brought to life by big-name reporters at major outlets.
Inexplicably, all the “mistakes” these journalists made were skewed in the exact same direction every time. To this day, networks that convinced half the country that a Russian asset purloined the presidency have yet to explain how their high-profile reporters got so much wrong.
Actually, these networks continue to feature the very same “experts” and guests, still opining with the very same confidence.
Not only is there no price paid for getting things wrong, there really is no financial incentive to be a grounded, straight-down-the-line, unbiased journalist these days.
It’s the @Acosta’s and @PhilipRucker’s of the world who get the book deals and big followings, not the diligent journalists poring over documents and offering serious, context-rich reporting.
Moreover, journalists no longer act as competitive outlets, they act like a political tribe — sanctimoniously operating as if their vocation imbues them with some great knowledge or morality.
CNN’s @ChrisCuomo can concoct a fabulist coronavirus resurrection, and virtually no journalist will speak up to defend their profession.
MSNBC’s Andy Lack will complain that Trump, who has done nothing to inhibit free speech, has “shaken the soul of the First Amendment,” but he offers not a word about the unprofessionalism of his market rival.
No matter how bad ratings are, no matter how little trust they engender — and though the entire journalism project is predicated on trust, it engenders less than most institutions — journalists do not grapple with the problem.
Just look at the crass hypocrisy of the coverage of Biden’s sexual-assault allegations. One can be critical of the Trump presidency and still wrestle with obvious double standards of journalism.
Instead, well-read “media critic” newsletters by reporters such as @BrianStelter have become indistinguishable from a Media Matters press release.
Conservatives are blackballed. Last year, when CNN hired moderate Republican Sarah Isgur, Jeff Sessions’s former spokeswoman, as political editor at its Washington bureau, there was a backlash from left-wing media types and activists. She was not there long.
To put this in perspective, the chief national-security correspondent at CNN, @jimsciutto, is a former member of the Obama administration.
ABC’s @GStephanopoulos is not only a former WH communications director for Bill Clinton, but someone who was donating to Hillary’s controversial foundation during the 2016 election even when he was ostensibly an unbiased moderator of that network’s Sunday news show.
If you want to know why news consumers have a difficult time making a distinction between reporters and opinion journalists, it’s because most of the time there is no difference.
