Commentary

When I noted that MSNBC and CNN made decisions not to provide live coverage of former President Trump’s victory speech in Iowa, depriving viewers of legitimate news, I began thinking about the anti-Trump bias that continues to exist within much of the media.

To refresh your memory, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow announced that her network chose to protect its viewers from Trump’s supposed “penchant for lying,” stating, “We will let you know if there’s any news made in the speech if there’s anything noteworthy, something substantive and important.”

Claiming the decision is “not out of spite,” Maddow said “it is not a decision we relish.” Do you believe that?

While CNN did cover about 10 minutes of Trump’s Iowa victory speech, host Jake Tapper broke in speaking over Trump, saying “Donald Trump declaring victory with a strong showing in the Iowa caucuses, noting “right now under my voice, you hear him repeating his anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

I was struck by the headline over Peggy Noonan’s column in the Saturday-Sunday edition of the Wall Street Journal, “Can the Media Get Trump Coverage Right?” Obviously, she too, was giving thought to potential 2024 coverage, but I mused ‘only Trump coverage?’

Reading it, it’s understandable.  Biden is mentioned in just four sentences within the column covering half of the newspaper’s opinion page.

Noting a poll that 58 percent of Republicans now say they have no trust in the news media, Noonan, suggests the media take a stab at what kind of coverage might help the country.

She offers, “If Mr. Trump has a bad moment on the trail, show it.  It’s not bias, it’s news.  If Mr. Biden has a bad moment, if he voices some rambly disconnected aria and has to be saved by the Secret Service from walking off the stage into the orchestra pit, show it.”

While I recognized that journalism’s reputation was greatly harmed by its 2020 negative coverage of Trump, resulting in charges of “fake news,” their coverage of Joe Biden also left a lot of criticism unreported.

The day-to-day coverage aside, it was the Deep State’s election interference that made the difference.  There was the letter signed by 51 former national security officers regarding the Hunter Biden laptop and the collusion of the FBI with executives of the social media, designed to help the Biden campaign just days before the election, that was successful.

Quoting former Washington Post editor Marty Baron, Noonan writes, “journalists must earn back public trust,” she says, “make the assumption that people won’t believe a word you say, and then say, okay, here’s the evidence.  We need to lay out the evidence.”

I needed a refresher on the 2020 campaigns, more than a simple review of my Kramerontheright archives. To me, there is no better reference than Jeff Gerth’s “The Press Versus the President,” a 24,000-word autopsy of the press during the Trump years, published by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) on February 4, 2023.

The four-part essay is the result of Gerth’s dozens of interviews with editors, reporters, and Trump himself, examining in granular detail the media’s coverage of Trump.

The review came about due to the credibility of the U.S. media being at its lowest – 26  percent – with 83 percent of Americans citing “fake news” as a problem.

In reviewing the CJR report, I was reminded of the extent of the flawed stories based on uncorroborated or debunked information that came to light. Gerth had pored over more than a half a million Trump-Russia articles during the Mueller investigation.

The media use of anonymous sources in its coverage of Trump was criticized by Gerth, who admitted he had used them himself in the past. “What’s was different in the Trump era,” he wrote, however, “was the volume of anonymous sources and the misleading way they were often described.”  The Times used anonymous sources over a thousand times in stories involving Trump and Russia.

“I realized early on I had two jobs,” Trump told Gerth. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival.  I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”

I was reminded of the Pulitzer Prize that the New York Times and Washington Post shared for reporting on Russiagate. It read: “For (their) deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

You might say ‘the 20 stories the Prize board reviewed were Exhibit A among the truths that the newspapers were obsessed with taking down the Trump administration.’

Bob Woodward, of the Post, known for his collaboration with Carl Bernstein in covering Watergate, conceded to Gerth that news coverage of the Russia inquiry “wasn’t handled well” and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.”

Through his interviews with journalists while writing his report for the CJR, Gerth found introspection among several journalists, including Matt Taibbi, who was once with the leftist Rolling Stone, and is now doing objective reporting.

In its coverage of the seriously flawed Pulitzer, the editorial board of the New York Post was critical of the New York Times and Washington Post, stating that “the liberal media had ‘destabilized U.S. democracy’ more than Russia ever could by feeding left-leaning Americans a constant, false narrative that their president was a sleeper agent.”

Writing this commentary on what we might expect in 2024 presidential campaign coverage after the hoaxes of 2016 and 2020, I find it incredible that President Biden turned down an opportunity to sit for a Super Bowl interview with Norah O’Donnell, that would have been viewed by millions around the world.

Biden and his handlers may keep the president under wraps as much as possible, but we can be sure former President Trump can be counted on to opine often.

May God continue to bless the United States of America