By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
The era of Donald Trump has produced a lot of handwringing from the mainstream political press, and a lot of loud pressure from progressives, both leaning into the same basic point: that the press should abandon the “bothsidesism” approach of reporting competing claims by political figures, and should even move beyond “just the facts” reporting, in order to bluntly tell the audience that Trump is a lying liar who is lying yet again. There is some merit to giving readers and viewers enough facts to draw conclusions about who is telling the truth, but the entire movement has also amplified the existing biases in favor of pushing the political press into more blatantly partisan advocacy.
This is dressed up as an elevation of journalistic ethics. In 2016, when CNN started posting chyrons on screen calling Trump a liar, Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox that “CNN has finally figured out how to cover Donald Trump’s constant lying.” That went on for years; in one pandemic press conference, CNN was telling its viewers things such as “Trump melts down in angry response to reports he ignored virus warnings,” “Angry Trump uses propaganda video, produced by government employees at taxpayers’ expense,” and “Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history on coronavirus response.”
In 2021, WGBH’s Dan Kennedy moaned that “the media remain wedded to their old tropes, covering political campaigns as though they were horse races and treating the two major parties as equally legitimate players with different views.” Nicole Hemmer interviewed NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen on Ezra Klein’s podcast and noted Rosen’s view that “the American mainstream press must make a choice: Will it double down on its commitment to detached, nonpartisan neutrality? Or will it choose instead to boldly and aggressively defend truth and democracy? These days, Rosen’s view seems almost common-sensical.” Dana Milbank of the Washington Post argued, “Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand.” There was a torrent of similar commentary after CNN hosted a town hall with Trump in May; PBS NewsHour ran a segment on how “CNN town hall highlights media’s struggle with how to cover Trump and his lies,” in which James Fallows argued that “Trump has his own set of rules, which he has earned.”
Well, okay. New rules, right? But Trump’s “own set of rules” somehow don’t apply when the very same press is covering Hamas, a terrorist group with a track record of false propaganda claims stretching back years, and which committed one of the most enormous terror attacks against civilians in world history less than two weeks ago.
Most of t he so called News we get is leftists Propaganda that the Chief Editor allows this is not Freedom of the Press its vast Government Controlled Media