Most of the mass media have been so outwardly hypocritical about President Donald Trump and the Republican Party that to not call them out, at this point, is to be complicit. While Trump and the GOP are anything but perfect, over the last few years the easily observable bias has done far more harm than good to our ability to have anything resembling a shared reality.
The report claiming that anonymous sources heard Trump called war veterans “losers” was an obvious smear piece, and many media outlets largely ignored the many on-the-record denials that such a thing ever happened. They also ignore Trump’s record of supporting veterans, police and other first responders — being at Ground Zero just two days after 9/11 and providing funding to save a veteran’s parade, for just two examples.
The media rehash what has been known for years about Trump’s taxes — that he does what everyone tries to do, minimize their tax burden as much as possible under the law. Everyone knows Amazon does exactly the same thing.
The media claim Trump plans to steal the election while endorsing efforts to completely change the electoral process and minimizing the real risks of mail-in voting. They desperately attempt to convince us that it will be “normal” if the results take a week or more to count. Hillary Clinton goes so far as to say that Joe Biden should never concede, and that, given enough time, he will win if they “don’t give an inch.”
How exactly might that occur?
The media claim mail-in voting is safe and secure, frequently “fact checking” that there is no evidence of widespread mail-in voting fraud. Yet there are examples from this very year: In August, a judge voided a municipal election in Paterson, N.J., specifically due to mail-in voting fraud. In Brooklyn, during the New York City primaries in June, 25% of the mail-in primary ballots were voided. Note that Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci both say it is safe to vote in person with the proper precautions. Note also that American Postal Workers Union has endorsed Biden.
The media claim that Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, isn’t a radical, yet a GovTrack analysis of her voting record scored her as the “most liberal” senator in 2019. They fail to press her on the hypocrisy of the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, on which she led the charge, versus the allegations against Biden made by Tara Reade (not to mention his endlessly creepy public behavior). And before being named the vice presidential nominee, Harris herself said she believed the other women who have accused Biden of inappropriate touching.
They call Trump a fascist and a warmonger. That ignores the fact that he’s resisted every opportunity to institute federal controls and mandates during the pandemic, and has been the only president in decades to not start a new foreign military conflict. In addition, he’s worked continuously to bring home American troops deployed around the world, despite congressional opposition.
The media call Trump a racist, backing up that claim with the easily debunked slander of his “very fine people on both sides” quote. Go ahead and watch or read his full statement following the Charlottesville, Va., incident. They claim he failed to condemn white supremacists in the first debate with Biden (he said “sure” when he was asked to) while ignoring the many times he has publicly condemned white supremacy.
They claim Trump has mishandled the pandemic, but in many cases, such as the opposition to the early March travel ban from China, his opponents advocated for policies that would have been worse. The media don’t want to acknowledge the frequently changing scientific guidance on things like masks, or that Democratic governors, like those in New York and New Jersey, made awful decisions, like forcing nursing homes to take COVID-19-positive patients, which contributed to a huge share of deaths.
They don’t report the near-nightly riots by anarchists and far-left extremists, including “antifa,” some of whom have gone so far as to try to block the doors of a Seattle police station while fires were being set around the building. They cry about Trump’s “secret police” but ignore the reason the federal officers were deployed in the first place — to defend federal property that was put under siege. They also ignore the violence that continues unchanged, whether or not federal officers are present, not to mention the officers who were killed or gravely injured as a direct result.
They call these events “mostly peaceful” — as if the word “riot” had disappeared from the English language.
Most of the mass media have been spiraling us into division, spinning up the daily rage cycles and making it more and more difficult for us to live within a shared vision and cultural foundation, without which we are hopeless in the face of the real big-picture problems that challenge us as a nation and, ultimately, by necessity, as a species.
Daniel T. Worts III lives in Windsor.