Over on last week’s Friday Open Forum, there is a discussion about “pet peeves.” Obviously one of mine is people who insist that there is no mainstream news media bias, despite the overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of news organizations, reporters, editors, broadcast news hosts and pundits are committed to “advocacy journalism” (that is, unethical journalism) and determined to advance the policies, ideology and major figures who reside on the left side of the political spectrum. I regard such people, which include a disturbing number of my friends and relatives, as one of four things: naive, dishonest, in denial, or not as bright as I thought they were due to bias, which, as we all know, makes us stupid.
I have felt this way for a long time (Hmmmm…I wonder when “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” became a tag on Ethics Alarms?), but if 2024 didn’t make anyone who maintained that our news organizations and “journalists” were largely objective realize that they had been duped, there is no hope for them.
The New York Times, naturally, is usually Exhibit A here, not because it is the most left-biased news organization (MSNBC gets that title, easily) but because the paper is regarded, still, as the gold standard of American journalism. For the Times to be so flagrantly biased and so often in thrall to the radical Left (See: “The 1619 Project”) is a rank betrayal of the American public and our democracy as well as journalism, all of which need independent, objective news reporting from the so-called “legacy media.” If the best news source is partisan, biased, and devoted to propaganda, what course is there for the public but to be cynical, distrustful, and ultimately uninformed?
And indeed we are.
Last week, the New York Times featured a discussion among three of its opinion columnists regarding their predictions for the upcoming Trump administration. There was Trump-Deranged conservative commentator David French, standard-issue Times Democratic Party propagandist Lynda Polgreen, and Bret Stephens, one of the Times’s Stockholm Syndrome token conservatives like David Brooks. Stephens is a conservative who wants to repeal the Second Amendment. Brilliant. He also detests Trump. I’ll bet my head that he voted for Kamala Harris, based on post-election columns like this one.
I read the transcript of their discussion, and it was, for the Times, reasonably balanced. But its headline was “‘Trump Is at His Absolute Worst in a Crisis’: Three Columnists Imagine the World Ahead.” The Times chose the most negative, Trump-Deranged statement in the whole piece to use in its headline. No bias there! As soon as I read it, I thought, “Oh, that’s David French, no doubt about it,” and it was. That quote did not fairly characterize the discussion, but it was the comment that most impugned Donald Trump, and that, ultimately, is what the Times, still, sees as its mission.
If the New York Times were a trustworthy news source, the quote introducing the piece would have been what Bret Stephens said at its conclusion: “Let’s not write off the new administration before it’s even begun.”
Ethics Alarms 
I was at a friend’s home yesterday and she has a tendency to keep books of every vintage in stacks. One that sat atop one of the stacks was a book entitled “Problems With American Democracy”. It was an old book so I opened it up and low and behold I opened it to a discussion on socialized medicine. It offered a fairly balanced review of the arguments for and against socialized medicine. As I perused other sections it had an entire chapter on why Americans needed to think for themselves and went on to describe the history of Scripps News service, UPI, the AP and several major national papers. It showed that each had its own slant and it was imperative that readers evaluate multiple reports because none could be trusted in their entirety. Given that the publication date of this book was 1940, perhaps the real difference today is that far too many of the American people would prefer to have their opinions given to them because thinking is hard.
The New York Times is usually Exhibit A here because the paper is regarded, still, as the gold standard of American journalism.
Yes. And this this is not a bug; this is a feature.
For the Times to be so flagrantly biased and so often in thrall to the radical Left is a rank betrayal of the American public and our democracy as well as journalism.
Absolutely. The American public are so stupid they need to be betrayed. Journalism is a tool of the oppressors. We’re not doing journalism, we’re better than that, we’re doing advocacy.
All of which need independent, objective news reporting from the so-called “legacy media.”
“The hell,” I say. The American public and ‘our’ democracy need what we, the left, have on offer, and they need to be protected from disinformation and from themselves because they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them. And we know what’s good for everyone.
If the best news source is partisan, biased, and devoted to propaganda, what course is there for the public but to be cynical, distrustful, and ultimately uninformed?
That’s an easy one! They have no course at all. Anyone who doesn’t gleefully buy what we’re selling will be deemed cynical, distrustful and uninformed! Ta dah!