For an alternate viewpoint, see “Counterpoint: Media ‘Bias’ Is a Perennial Part of Elections.”
A long time ago, the American people expected reporters to gather and report the facts, explain the arguments of political parties, and keep their opinions out of it. Today, reporters openly express their opinions, in their stories and in nearly every utterance on television and social media.
The “objective” media’s long, slow descent into public distrust comes from their self-important belief that the people cannot be trusted to choose leaders for themselves. They must be guided by a highly educated elite who represent the lifeblood of democracy. Criticize the media elite, and they imply you signal your preference for authoritarianism. They never seem to recognize that criticizing the media is part of a vibrant democracy.
Two types of bias are the most dramatic: bias by commission and bias by omission. Everyone can see the commission of bias when journalists insist, for example, that Donald Trump is comparable to Adolf Hitler or when writers compare the coolness of Kamala Harris to Beyonce and Taylor Swift. It’s the bias by omission that can be more difficult to detect.
In 1992, CBS News correspondent Betsy Aaron warned, “The largest opinion is what we leave out.” She said, “I always say worry about what you’re not seeing. What you are seeing you can really criticize because you’re smart and have opinions. But if we don’t tell you anything, and we leave whole areas uncovered, that’s the danger.”
During the 2020 campaign, the pro-Joe Biden media refused to focus on the New York Post scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop, an omission compounded by the Post being squashed on social media. When the subject burbled up, the liberal media then promoted a Biden campaign-organized letter trashing the laptop story as bearing “the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”
A Media Research Center poll of swing-state voters taken by McLaughlin & Associates after the election found 36 percent of Biden voters were unaware of the evidence from the laptop linking Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through Hunter’s lobbying exploits. Thirteen percent of these voters (or 4.6 percent of Biden’s total vote) said that had they known these facts, they would not have voted for Biden. If that had happened, Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes.
In this election cycle, our most prestigious media outlets professed outrage that anyone would question the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden right up until his disastrous debate on CNN. Now that Biden has been forced out and Kamala Harris has been forced in, the media are incessantly celebrating Harris’ “momentum.” At the same time, she refuses to submit to any interviews or news conferences.
“Democracy dies in darkness” doesn’t apply to this basement campaign.
The “news” networks sound more like talk radio, and too many viciously negative and rapturously positive stories don’t qualify as “news” at all. It’s more like free advertising.
Media bias has affected every modern American election, but in recent years, even before the arrival of Trump, the Republican candidates have openly campaigned against the “mainstream” media’s blatant favoritism for extremist Democrats.
Calling these unofficial Democratic Party publicists the “enemy of the people” is too harsh, Still, they are obviously the enemy of Republicans. They display contempt not only for Republican politicians but for Republican voters, who they imply are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and theocratic.
Unsurprisingly, these media businesses have no interest in attracting half their potential audience. It’s only surprising they garishly pose, like Democrats do, as unifying figures who would like to heal the soul of America.
