Over the past seven years, it has become abundantly clear that members of the activist media do not live in the same world as the rest of us. Being that most tend to be part of the elite class, it seems rare that one of these intrepid individuals would deign to come down from their ivory towers to commune with the rest of us plebes.
It is this elitism that leads to op-eds like the one I came across. The piece, written by columnist Margaret Sullivan, was titled: “If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way: A Journalist’s Manifesto.”
In the article, the media activist expressed similar sentiments to that of CNN’s Don Lemon, who once complained that the once-vaunted Fourth Estate was not biased enough in its coverage of former President Donald Trump. She urged her fellow activists to go even harder on the Orange Man What Is Bad™ if he decides to run for president again.
Sullivan argued that during six years of covering Trump, “we acted as his stenographers or megaphones” and that “too often, we failed to refer to his many falsehoods as lies.”
The author declared that if Trump seeks another presidential run in 2024, “old-style journalism will no longer suffice.”
Sullivan recalled how she supposedly tried to seek “common ground” with Trump supporters in 2016 but found it difficult because many believed the press was biased in favor of the elites and the left. She cited the New York Times’ coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal as evidence that they took an objective and balanced approach to the campaign. Nevertheless, one of the pro-Trump delegates she met insisted that “If it’s a Republican, it’s investigated to death. If it’s a Democrat, it’s breezed over.”
It was this reality that led Sullivan to believe that “the mainstream press was too often going easy on Trump” and to argue that members of the press “didn’t want to use the word ‘lie’ for Trump’s constant barrage of falsehoods.”
The author argued that instead of continuing to embrace “old-style performative neutrality,” and “taking everything down the middle,” reporters should “be thinking about what coverage serves the public best.”
Of course, we know what this means, don’t we?
It means members of the press should not bother to legitimize people who question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. They should not worry about having an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on television programming.
Of course, the author goes on to argue that reporters should not behave as if they are siding with the former president’s opponents, and should be “just as tough on Democrats” if they begin “lying all the time or trashing governmental norms.”
I wonder how Sullivan felt about the Russia collusion hoax spread by her ilk to convince the public that Trump did not win the 2016 election fairly?
While the media activist pretends she wishes to treat both parties fairly, it is evident that what she is really encouraging is for the press to do more of what they did while Trump was in office. The notion that they were easy on the former president is laughable on its face.
The press routinely compared Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis. They perpetuated lie after lie after lie about his presidency. Remember the “fine people” hoax in which CNN and other outlets pretended he complimented neo-Nazis and white supremacists? Those with a keen memory might even remember koipondgate. And we certainly can’t forget their contention that he told people to go into their laundry room and start injecting bleach into their veins to cure COVID-19.
This is over-the-top bias even for the activist media, which at least offered up the veneer of objectivity before the days of Trump. The fact that folks like Sullivan believe their reportage on the Trump presidency was “too easy” just further demonstrates the reality that most of these folks have spent too much time in the echo chamber. As long as this is the case, there is absolutely no reason for the public to take anything they say seriously.
