Distrust of Media Isn't a Mystery
They Push an Agenda, Sometimes to the Point of Lying, and Think You Won't Notice
Earlier this week, a bill protecting parents’ rights not to have their young elementary school children taught about sexuality and gender theory passed in Florida. But you wouldn’t know that from media coverage.
The bill quickly attracted scorn from the Alphabet Activists and most prominent Democrats. They labeled the proposal the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, despite the fact that it does not mention the word “gay” or refer to homosexuality.
In fact, most of the language has nothing to do with anything sexual at all. It’s a parental rights / parental notification bill that does include the following provision:
3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
The “controversial” portion of the bill puts forth the (evidently alarming to some) proposition that classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity shouldn’t be part of the K-3(!) curriculum.
The presentation of this bill to the public by many politicians and activists holds this idea up as somehow evil, when, to most Floridians—and most Americans—the propriety of not teaching sexual topics to young children is self-evident.
Putting aside a question about the nefarious motivations some opponents of this bill must have, what is most striking is not that politicians and activists created fiction to support their preferred outcome. As unfortunate as it is, that is simply what politicians and activists do.
No, the striking—but unsurprising—part is that nearly every local and national media outlet covering the bill instantly adopted the terminology, slogan, and talking points of one vocal side of the debate, often completely omitting the actual content of the bill, particularly the fact that the provision only applies up to the third grade.
Were the media biased in the other direction, or perhaps merely fair, outlets could have framed the bill not as activists do, but as pro-parent, pro-family, pro-decency, anti-grooming, and/or pro-child. Instead, they elected to frame it, as usual, as implicitly or explicitly pro-“hate.”
Has the media always been this bad?
No, but media bias has a long history and is likely inevitable to some degree.
Despite some appearances to the contrary, media members are, in fact human. All humans have cultural baggage and biases. You, me, all of us.
Some of us are much better at rational and objective analysis, however. We can hope that journalists would be as good as or better than members of any other profession at restraining those biases, but we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that the beliefs of even a disciplined journalist sometimes filter through his reporting.
Something like that is what we thought of as media bias in the latter half of the 20th century. This was the New York Times presenting news about the Vietnam War to make it seem more disastrous, or major TV networks framing Watergate as the most shocking scandal in American political history, rather than a lamentable but mostly just embarrassing botched burglary.
That was the classic “liberal media” slant that existed for years, and, if anything, was a weaker cousin to what had preceded it—the sensationalistic “yellow” journalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which powerful publishers dictated the news cycle, often in service of their own financial or political interests.
In more contemporary times, media bias looked and sounded more like news reporters who were obviously liberal Democrats “salting” the news to be more charitable to their own side (all the while insisting they had no side).
In an odd way, I miss that almost-quaint media bias of my youth. You knew it was there, and you just had to adjust for it, like hitting a six iron into a strong crosswind.
But a dangerous, new element began to surface around the time the Internet became ubiquitous.
The willingness of media members to push their own agenda began to include an unprecedented sliding scale for journalistic standards. The first major example that comes to mind is the Dan Rather / George W. Bush National Guard documents controversy, in which Rather pushed a story about Bush’s service based on documents whose authenticity was quickly called into question.
The important thing to understand about the difference between then and now, though, is that heads rolled. Rather’s long career effectively came to an end, and CBS terminated or asked for the resignations of several other high-profile employees.
Today, mainstream media is so entrenched and oblivious to the way that the median American thinks that these sorts of oversights are simply shrugged off. Part of the reason is that there isn’t simply one outlet willing to drop all pretense of standards to promote a flimsy-but-politically-expedient story—nearly every outlet is.
Thus, if CNN alone had presented the poorly sourced Steele Dossier story as if it were truth, then it’s at least possible that those responsible would have been demoted or terminated once the dossier’s extremely dubious nature came to light.
Instead, every network and most major newspapers uncritically reported on the dossier as factual. Opinion writers and commentators from coast to coast couldn’t wait to accuse Trump of being a Russian asset, or to say he was in Putin’s back pocket.
When it became apparent they had been on much shakier ground than they initially imagined, there was only token and performative introspection—if any. No heads rolled. These outlets were quickly on to the next mistake.
When everyone is guilty, accountability becomes much more of a challenge.
On the flipside, the same contemptable clowns who told us to believe in the dossier, or who lionized now-convicted felon Michael Avenatti and pushed him as a viable presidential candidate, or who promoted the idea that Brett Kavanaugh might be a gang rapist suddenly all turned into Edward R. Murrow when it came to the embarrassing contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Tech companies, who generally align with major media outlets ideologically, likewise intervened to prevent the dissemination of stories from those few outlets that did attempt to cover the laptop story.
Anyone who is paying attention can see all of this for what it is.
The institutional takeover of most media outlets by a particular strain of activist-minded journo has emboldened (or made more oblivious) these bad actors. That activism has paired the existing, old-school political slant with a new willingness to dispense with journalistic norms when inconvenient to promoting journalists’ preferred ideology—and to viciously and religiously adhere to a perverted version of those norms when a story will compromise that ideology.
In fact, the new generation of journalists openly decry the very notion of objectivity, often derisively referring to it as harmful “both-sides-ism.”
Major online, print, and broadcast outlets have become so comfortable in their echo chamber that they explicitly call for an end to treating Republicans or conservatives as worthy of a fair shake.
This point of view, undoubtedly marinated in the juices of the finest DC and Manhattan cocktail parties, holds that journalists aren’t biased enough against conservatives, because reality itself is “biased” far to the left. Even treating Republicans as something other than criminal conspirators who want to destroy the country is to give them too much credit.
This isn’t Walter Cronkite shading his words to make the liberal position sound more reasonable in the 70s. This is modern outlets telling you who they are:
People who hate you.
Believe them when they say it.
Even as they face ever-dwindling circulation figures and ratings, their slavish (and self-defeating) devotion to ideological activism continues apace. Never forget that.
The next time you see these outlets suddenly walking in lockstep in a way that mimics left-leaning talking points, whether it’s “Don’t Say Gay” or “Putin’s Price Hike,” reflect on what is happening, why it is happening, and what it says about the people making it happen.
Also think about the indifference to—or contempt for—the audience that is required to do it.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think this is all part of a coordinated scheme of some kind. Instead, the phenomenon is merely a reflection of both natural human weakness and an increasingly homogeneous industry that demands ideological purity.
There are good and fair journalists out there, both at mainstream outlets and in alternative outlets. But they are too rare. Increasingly rare.
Dan Rather himself provides the personification of the decline of the news industry. Once a respected journalist, albeit a biased one, Rather has devolved into a purveyor of predictable, unimaginative, left-leaning opinion and insults via Twitter.
Rather, by the way, still adamantly maintains that he got the Bush story right.
That type of thinking is now perhaps the prevailing view among the current generation of media leaders and journalists, unlike the environment in which Rather found himself two decades ago.
Until the media and related sectors recommit themselves to even-handedness and rediscover the discipline to avoid putting a finger on the proverbial scales, the declining trust that the public has for national media outlets will continue to trend downward.
Deservedly so.