OTOH, Democrats Love the Press

OTOH, Democrats Love the Press

Last time I wrote about the frank dishonesty of the Washington Post on the subject of domestic violence.  The paper published its most recent accurate and balanced piece on DV in 1993.  Since then, all the articles slant one way – toward men as perpetrators and women as victims.

That of course is just part of a larger trend in the legacy media away from objectivity and in favor of narratives that only admit of facts that support the narrative.  Therefore, we’re told that racism is the cause of racial disparities in this country, but never that there might be other explanations.  Those who dare to offer those other explanations are sent straight to the digital pillory.

I went on to connect the historically low and downward trend of the public’s respect for the news media with that decline in factual objectivity.

All that seems true enough, but, when respondents are divided according to political persuasion, Gallup’s data reveal something different and quite striking.  Republicans and Independents’ trust in the press is abysmal; just 14% of Republicans and 27% of Independents have a high or even a fairly high regard for the news media and those figures continue downward.  But a funny thing happens when we turn to Democrats.  Their trust in the press has always been higher than that of the other two, but, a short time ago, it rocketed upward.  Care to guess when that happened?  If you guessed 2016, Trump’s election year, go to the head of the class.

In that single year, Democrats saying they had either a high or a fairly high level of trust in the press leapt a hefty 21 percentage points (41%!) from about 51% to about 72%.  The next year it went even higher to 76% before moderating to 70% in 2022.

In short, Donald Trump’s presidency looks to have been a lovely Christmas present for the news organizations read and listened to by Democrats.  They were all but unanimous in their contempt for him and willing to say pretty much anything as long as it was a smear.  More important was their willingness to abandon any pretense of balance in dealing with him or his supporters and anything that even remotely questioned the woke narrative that was and is still embraced by newsrooms across the country.  The title of Jeff Gerth’s recent series in the Columbia Journalism Review – “The Press versus the President” – says it all.

Which brings me back to Andrew Sullivan’s piece on Substack in November 2021.  Here’s the money quotation:

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem.

Yes, the legacy media got a lot wrong during the Trump years and still do.  And all those errors (and outright lies) did point in the same direction – anti-Trump, anti-Trump supporters, anti-conservative, anti-traditional liberal, pro-progressive, pro-woke.

Sullivan listed some 20 major stories in just three years that the leftist media got not only wrong, but did so spectacularly.  Those were stories that anyone equipped with the faculty of critical thought would have at least seriously questioned from the outset, but few did.  Kyle Rittenhouse was a white-supremacist vigilante who feloniously transported a firearm across state lines in order to commit unwarranted violence.  No, actually he was none of those things and the video of him shooting two people plainly showed him defending his own life, a fact a jury later found.

Jussie Smollett was attacked by two white supremacists wearing MAGA caps and carrying a noose at two in the morning when the temperature was below zero Fahrenheit on the streets of Chicago.  No, actually, he paid two black men to rough him up a bit and lied about the rest.

In Canada, hundreds of graves of Indigenous youths were discovered on the grounds of schools for those youth.  No, actually no such graves were discovered and Indigenous people had been debunking the claim for years when the New York Times ran with the story anyway.

The emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop are Russian disinformation.  No, actually, they’re Hunter Biden’s emails, some of which suggest payoffs to him (and possibly Joe Biden) for being Joe Biden’s son.

Vladimir Putin placed bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan.  No, actually he didn’t.

COVID kills about 3% of the people who contract it.  No, actually it’s closer to one person in 1,300.

Officer Brian Sicknick’s head was bashed in by Trump “insurrectionists” wielding a fire extinguisher.  No, actually there was no such attack and he died of natural causes a day later at his home.

Sullivan continued:

They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

And the beat goes on, right up to the present when we’ve been told the Biden Administration had nothing to do with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline.  Veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reveals otherwise, to yawns by Democrats and the leftist press.

“All things considered,” it’s beginning to look like Democrats tend to favor narrative over facts as long as the narrative promotes their preconceived notions about conservatives, Republicans, Russians, Trump, racism, sexism, transsexuality, all things woke, etc.  They’re not interested in facts that contradict those cherished narratives and so they flock enthusiastically to media that hourly give them what they want.  At the end of 2022, digital subscriptions to the New York Times numbered more than 6.3 million, over six times the number when Trump took office.

In short, Democrats love today’s news media; the rest of the country despises them.

I’ll say more about this next time.

This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.

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