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The Unapologetic Bias of the American Left
[AmericanThinker] Some yearn for the ancient monopolistic days of network news, the adolescent years of public radio and TV, and the still reputable New York Times—when once upon a time the Left at least tried to mask their progressivism in sober and judicious liberal facades. An avuncular Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Jim Lehrer, or Abe Rosenthal at least went through the motions of reporting news that was awkward or even embarrassing to the Left. Their agenda was 1960s-vintage Great Society liberalism, seen as the natural evolution from the New Deal and post-war internationalism. Edward R. Murrow, the ACLU of old, and Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—these were their liberal referents. Those days are gone. Yet even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too. REJECTING OBJECTIVITY What ended liberal dissimulation about slanted reporting is a new pride, or rather an arrogance, about bias itself. The new liberated defiance is something like, "We are biased. Damn proud of it. And what exactly do you plan on doing about it?" Jim Rutenberg infamously announced in January 2017 his profession’s proud defiance of now ossified norms in a new age in which reporters would "throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century." Christiane Amanpour felt she was now released from the old chains of professed "objectivity." "Much of the media was tying itself in knots trying to differentiate between balance, between objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, the truth," she said just a few weeks after the 2016 election. "We cannot continue the old paradigm." Michel Foucault could not have said it any better. Univision’s Jorge Ramos more or less ridiculed classical journalistic training and embraced the liberation from the old bourgeois idea of "neutrality." Saying that reporters should abandon neutrality on certain issues and choose sides may seem at odds with everything that’s taught in journalism school. But there are times when the only way we journalists can fulfill our primary social responsibility—challenging those in power—is by leaving neutrality aside. Or as the New York Times’ Jim Roberts in 2016 put the new "Walter Durantyism": "Yes. The media is biased. Biased against hatred, sexism, racism, incompetence, belligerence, inequality, To [sic] name a few." So said them all. In Orwellian terms, Roberts’ media has now come to adore the omnipresent progressive party line: "You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him." When early on in the Trump Administration, the liberal Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that in the first 100 days all news coverage was on average 80 percent anti-Trump—93 percent negative in the case of CNN and NBC—no one seemed embarrassed. Again, since May 2017, the bias has not merely increased but is now a badge of honor—whether it was the months of "walls or closing in" fake stories of imminent Mueller investigation indictments of the Trump family or the serial "Trump is finished" psychodramas about the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, and the 25th Amendment. No one in the media, to this day, after the Mueller implosion, the findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and the recent releases of Russian intercepts about the Clinton gambit to fabricate a "collusion" election narrative, has ever said "We were wrong"—because they really think they were "right" in pushing even untruth, given their hatred of Trump. COOKING THE DEBATES We can see the new arrogance manifested in a variety of ways. In the recent debates and town halls, the moderators were as praised by the media as they were a turn off to many in the public who were disgusted by their arrogance in making no attempt to appear fair.
Posted by: 746 2020-10-20 |
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