For an alternate viewpoint, see “Point: Beware Bias by Omission.”
Donald Trump’s esteem for Vladimir Putin is well known. For more than a decade, starting before he became president, Trump has expressed admiration for the Russian strongman, from his October 2013 claim that Putin had “done really a great job of outsmarting our country” to his July 2018 assertion at their Helsinki summit that he trusted Putin’s denial of having meddled in the 2016 U.S. election over FBI evidence of Russian interference.
The Trump-Putin bromance was mocked by some of their critics. In Vilnius, Lithuania, the capital of the former Soviet republic, a large mural depicting them embraced in a deep kiss became a tourist attraction.
As bad as Putin is, Trump has an affinity with a far more murderous Russian dictator. His repeated accusations of the news media as “the enemy of the people” tie him directly to Josef Stalin, who sent millions to their deaths over three decades as a Soviet despot. At a 1956 secret meeting of Communist leaders after Stalin’s death, the new Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, said Stalin had originated the phrase.
“It made possible the use of the cruelest repression, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations,” Khrushchev said.
Trump routinely draws enthusiastic applause at his rallies when he gestures to reporters standing in the back and upbraids them for peddling “fake news.” His bombastic insults are new for a president or former president, yet political diatribe is hardly new in American politics. In fact, it is as old as the republic itself.
Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as our greatest president. Still, in his time, he was reviled, often in the ugliest terms, by his political opponents and their journalistic allies. Abolitionists who felt he was moving too slowly to end slavery called him a barbarian and a gorilla. Confederates competed to hurl the ugliest slurs, with one branding him “a feculent excrescence of Northwestern vulgarity.”
A century earlier, U.S. newspapers trafficked in mean invectives against some of our Founding Fathers. The 1796 election to succeed George Washington as the second president featured Thomas Jefferson against John Adams. Ignoring Washington’s warnings against divisive factions in his farewell address, supporters of both men spared little by blasphemy.
An article by J.T. Callender in the Richmond (Va.) Recorder on Sept. 2, 1802, said Jefferson was having an affair with one of his female slaves. While that claim would be proven true two centuries later in a DNA study commissioned by the nonprofit foundation that runs Monticello, Jefferson’s former estate, few slurs could have been more scandalous at the time. Today, descendants of Jefferson and the slave, Sally Hemings, come together for an annual reunion at Monticello.
Jefferson’s allies, in turn, accused Adams of wanting to be a monarch and planning to name his son as his successor. They ridiculed his weight with the moniker “His Rotundity.”
The notion of objective news is a recent objective in American journalism. Media bias, by contrast, has been with us from the start, and Trump is hardly the first politician to try to turn it to his advantage.
Sen. Jesse Helms used his role as a TV commentator in the 1960s to gain election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, a post he held for three decades. On television and on Capitol Hill, Helms regularly and loudly blamed liberals for the country’s ills. When I covered him in the 1990s, interviewing him as we walked through vast marble hallways, he would greet North Carolina constituents who stopped him, introducing me as “the best liberal reporter in Washington.”
Ronald Reagan used frequent attacks on liberals in his campaigns and tenures as California governor and U.S. president. In a 1964 nationally televised speech that launched his gubernatorial campaign, he accused liberals of being soft on communism. Arguing that war was less risky than coddling the Soviet Union, he said, “Every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face.”
Reagan is now viewed as a successful president, with a 2021 C-SPAN survey of historians and political scientists across the ideological spectrum ranking him No. 9. Many credit him with ending the Cold War by compelling the Soviet Union to try to match his increased military spending. However, during his two terms and for some time afterward, he was widely criticized by prominent media figures.
George Will of ABC, then considered a conservative, belittled his “Morning in America goo.” NBC’s Bryant Gumbel said, “Largely as a result of the policies and priorities of the Reagan administration, more people are becoming poor and staying poor in this country than at any time since World War II.”
Through all their changes, from pamphlets and newspapers to radio and television and now to social media and digital platforms, American news outlets have always been biased — unfair in the eyes of those who disagreed with their reports. And that interplay of news producers and news consumers, often unruly and occasionally violent, has always affected U.S. elections, and as long as there is a free press, it always will.
