August 10, 2020
CNN takes first place in the ‘total lack of self-awareness’ category
One of the givens in modern American politics is that the media despise President Trump. Except for Fox News, which gives him a fair shake, the rest of the American media have a hatred so intense that, no matter the story, they have to give it an anti-Trump twist.
No wonder jokes circulate that if Trump announced he’d found a cure for cancer, the media would instantly lambaste him for taking work away from doctors. That’s why it was so funny to see Brian Stelter and a guest applaud themselves for their fair-mindedness.
We already know that journalists hew left — way, way left. Of those American journalists who donated to a presidential candidate in 2016, well over 96% donated to Hillary Clinton. As a general matter, outside 2016, journalists overwhelmingly donate to Democrat causes.
A recent study also revealed that journalists live in a bubble even smaller than conservatives initially thought. We assumed that they lived in a leftist bubble. It turns out, though, that they live in a subset of that bubble, one we could call the “leftist journalist bubble“:
Journalists in Washington, D.C., have long been accused of living in a “Beltway bubble,” isolated from the broader public, talking too much to each other.
Their interactions on Twitter, however, show them congregating in even smaller “microbubbles,” says a recent study. The journalists within each communicate more among themselves than with journalists outside the group.
That means Beltway journalism “may be even more insular than previously thought,” say study authors Nikki Usher and Yee Man Margaret Ng, “raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.”
When it comes to Trump, the mainstream media’s negativity has reached heights unseen in all previous presidential administrations. By January of this year, before the hysteria ratcheted up even more over coronavirus, the media’s Trump coverage was 93% negative.
That’s the background. And now for the video that would surely win an award (if there were one) for the least self-aware people in America:
Stelter defended the video clip by saying he and his guests were discussing talk radio, not news radio, but that’s a no-go. What got everyone’s attention, and that he cannot walk back, is the fact that he and his guest are so certain that no one on the left would ever engage in purely negative reporting about a presidential candidate.
I’ve watched the video three times now and still find it hysterically funny. I also find it frightening. Whether we like it or not, the American media still have a disproportionate say in the way Americans view themselves, their country, and their political leaders.
The fact that the people behind the media are the equivalent of a pack of dogs endlessly sniffing each other’s rears in the search for reportable news signals a country in swift decline. Donald Trump, to his great credit, has been challenging them every step of the way, but, despite 73% of Americans distrusting the media, at least half the country is still swayed by what journalists say.