Donald Trump may or may not fix his
campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not
become the first female president. But something else happening
before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American
journalism as we know it.
The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton
campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was
considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.
The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite
media is unlike anything seen in modern America.
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and
major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned
all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the
Oval Office has no precedent.
Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native
criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of
Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are
treated gently by comparison.
By torching its remaining credibility in service of
Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will
the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected
to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful
and blatant fashion.
Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake.
The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the
comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big
government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young
ones.
I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times
while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of
certainty about right and wrong.
My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss
of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he
leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”
That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was
scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by
giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state
structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.
Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet
as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance
of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.
A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg,
whom I know and like, began this way: “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?”
Whoa, Nellie. The clear assumption is that many reporters
see Trump that way, and it is noteworthy that no similar question is raised
about Clinton, whose scandals are deserving only of “scrutiny.” Rutenberg
approvingly cites a leftist journalist who calls one candidate “normal” and the
other “abnormal.”
Clinton is hardly “normal” to the 68 percent of Americans
who find her dishonest and untrustworthy, though apparently not a single one of
those people writes for the Times. Statistically, that makes the Times
“abnormal.”
Also, you don’t need to be a detective to hear echoes in
that first paragraph of Clinton speeches and ads, including those featured
prominently on the Times’ Web site. In effect, the paper has seamlessly adopted
Clinton’s view as its own, then tries to justify its coverage.
It’s an impossible task, and Rutenberg fails because he
must. Any reporter who agrees with Clinton about Trump has no business covering
either candidate.
It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert
in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of its own. And with the top
political editor quoted in the story as approving the one-sided coverage as
necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.
It’s a historic mistake and a complete break with the
paper’s own traditions. Instead of dropping its standards, the Times should
bend over backwards to enforce them, even while acknowledging that Trump is a
rare breed. That’s the whole point of standards — they are designed to guide
decisions not just in easy cases, but in all cases, to preserve trust.
The Times, of course, is not alone in becoming unhinged
over Trump, but that’s also the point. It used to be unique because of its
adherence to fairness.
Now its only standard is a double standard, one that it
proudly confesses. Shame would be more appropriate.
