The American Media: Enemies of the People?

[Geee]

Real Clear Policy

One of Donald Trump’s most controversial claims is that the media are the enemy of the people. It embarrasses and pains me, after a lengthy career as the head of a Washington think tank financially supported by the media, to say that this is not an unfair description. It’s an overstatement, and it hasn’t always been true, but it’s a fitting characterization of the vast majority of the U.S. media today.

People who are politically astute and fair-minded have long known that the broadcast networks and leading newspapers are liberal and Democrat leaning. But until the last five years or so the media practiced a discernable degree of separation between news and opinion, and eschewed displays of overt bias.

Not so now. Today, most of the so-called elite media openly commingle news and opinion and actively suppress or distort stories that don’t fit their shared narrative.

In this fashion they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as “Russian disinformation;” they ignored or demeaned stories and individuals linking the coronavirus to the Wuhan lab; and they enthusiastically spread for years the lie of Trump/Russia collusion despite the overwhelming evidence that the real collusion was committed by Hillary Clinton cronies and sympathetic individuals in the FBI, CIA, and elsewhere.

Indeed, the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of which received Pulitzer Prizes for their “Russiagate” stories, steadfastly refuse even now to return those prizes.

Are examples like these sufficient to warrant the accusation of being enemies of the people? I think they are. Consider the consequences: Because legacy and social media dismissed the Hunter Biden story, millions of Americans never knew the depth of Hunter’s depravity or the suggestion that some of the millions of dollars he earned from clients in China and the Ukraine were meant for the “big guy,” Joe Biden himself.