Reckoning over media’s biased coverage of Trump is due
Whether you supported or opposed President Trump or President-elect Joe Biden is irrelevant to the problems that this country faced int he recent elections. The real challenge was the failure of the mainstream news media is maintain is professionalism and to denigrate into a partisan organization that promoted one-sided, unfair and imbalanced news coverage that denied the public all the facts they needed to make their own judgments about the election. The news media thinks the public is stupid and believes they need to tell you what is right and what is wrong. That needs to change
By Ray Hanania
The Electoral College voted Monday to certify Joseph Biden as the winner of the November 3, 2020 General election, the only real official source for who won and who lost.
That might end President Trump’s claims of voter fraud but it won’t end the real reckoning that is due, the news media’s abusive and unprofessional conduct during the past four years.
This isn’t about Trump and it’s not about Biden. It is about how the news media conducted itself, acting less as professional journalists and more like partisan activists who spent most of their time exaggerating the positives of one candidate, Biden, while exaggerating the negatives of another, Trump.
If you set aside your love or hatred for Trump or Biden, and if you do a fair and objective audit of the news media’s conduct, there is no other conclusion that one can come to except that the national news media violated every principle it claims to uphold from fairness and objectivity to even truth.
Trump has not been the greatest president. He has had some great policies and ideas but he has been his own worst enemy making himself an easy target of biased media criticism. His sometimes imbecilic blathering on Twitter has undermined almost all of his achievements.
Trump basically gave the media the ammunition it needed to violate their journalistic principles, and the media did it willingly.
In almost every news media report, the media acted like the mouthpiece for Trump’s critics. They championed Biden without ever really looking closely at genuine controversies about Biden that should be closely examined.
More egregious has been the media’s assertion that Trump had no right to challenge the election results, claiming incredulously that there has never been any fraud in the voting process.
Are you kidding me? Voting has been one of the most corrupt and controversial exercises of the American Democratic process. Votes are stolen all the time.
When progressives and Leftists over the years have made that argument, the media took those claims seriously and gave the claims credibility by reporting on the allegations of voter fraud. But when Trump made those claims, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde news media attacked the assertions with a revulsion and vengeance never seen before in American politics.
The supposedly “objective,” “fair” and “professional” news media called Trump a “liar” and labeled his claims “fraud” with an unprecedented loathing, as if Trump had insulted Mother Theresa or even Jesus Christ!
Trump has every right to make assertions of fraud and theft in the voting process. The media’s professional role should have been to report it, separating their partisan opinions from their professional responsibility to “report the news” fairly and objectively.
The news media is two animals, consisting of reporters who are supposed “report” the news and commentators who write their opinions that are identified as opinions. An opinion column is an expression of a journalist’s personal, partisan and subjective views. A news report is supposed to be balanced and devoid of opinion that is supposed to present “both sides” of a news story.
Instead, reporters basically converted their “news” stories into unlabeled opinion commentaries. The worst was social media like Twitter which placed disclaimers after all of Trump’s Tweets on voter fraud. The disclaimers were much like those placed on packs of cigarettes warning smoking can be hazardous to your health.
I AM NOT saying Trump’s assertions of voter fraud are significant enough to have ever changed the results of the election. I AM saying he has the absolute right to make those claims. Instead of editorializing in their news coverage, the media should have spent more time investigating those claims.
There is more than enough evidence that votes were stolen in several key states by partisan tabulators. Hidden boxes of ballots. Absentee mail-in ballots mailed to people who never asked to receive the ballots. People not qualified to vote actually voting with some even voting twice – once at the polls and once by mail.
Is it enough to reverse the election results? I don’t believe so. What the media should fear is that what goes around comes around.
Election fraud isn’t about who is popular and who is not popular. It is about the fundamental essence of Democracy. America is not the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea or Iran. But in coverage of the Presidential election, the media’s bias made them worse.
Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
Email Ray Hanania at rghanania@gmail.com.
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