NB: The April 2019 issue of Esquirefeatures a long, eye-opening article on how attacks on Trump havepermanently damaged the media’s reputation (always fragile) for objectivity. Boyer aimed at several media targets but his main focus was the New York Times.
“Donald Trump Changed The New York Times. Is It Forever? — Donald Trump has shattered presidential standards. In response, The New York Times and other elite news organizations have scrapped their rigorous, long-held standards of objectivity. But will the Times’s changes have unintended consequences? And what does Trump himself think of all this?”
The president had some criticism for one Times story in particular.
When the closing gavels came down on the 2016 political conventions, the news cycle did not ease into the usual midsummer lull but instead locked directly into a state of high alarm, with Donald J. Trump at its center….
Boyer gives us a sample of Trump as a New York Times critic.
But amid those passing controversies was one story that Trump himself remembers clearly still. “Yep, very famous story,” he remarked to me in a recent interview. “It was a very important story…” Trump was referring to a front-page New York Times article published on August 8, 2016, under the headline “The Challenge Trump Poses to Objectivity.” The opening paragraph posed a provocative question:
“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
….
Trump said that was an important article because “they basically admitted that they were frauds.”
“They admitted in that story that they didn’t care about journalism anymore,” he continued, “that they were just going to write badly. That was an amazing admission.”
It’s an essential Trumpian assertion — wildly hyperbolic, but containing what much of Red America would consider a sort of rough truth.
Rutenberg’s cri de coeur begged many questions, including this one posed by Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell and Tim Graham: “Impartiality is mandatory in political coverage. If a reporter cannot manage this — and some simply cannot — then he should recuse himself from the assignment. This is first-semester journalism. Why can’t that cardinal rule be followed?” more
Two points:
1. Mueller didn’t free Trump from the collusion narrative. Trump Freed Trump. He never did anything wrong.
2. Trump didn’t destroy the NY Times, The NY Times destroyed the NY Times. They had bad reporting.
Who made who?
To me, the media has been this way my entire adult life. Their bias seeps into every story and they are incapable of producing an objectively correct recital of facts before shoehorning a story into their preformed narrative.
If you’re going to be smeared, and you know going in that you are going to be smeared, you need someone who is no to going to play that game and will challenge every premise.
It started with Clinton. They didn’t want to report on his sexual harassment case and decided, openly so, to never damage their candidate again. They didn’t report on Gore’s infidelities and actively covered up John Edwards’ hiding behind his cancer stricken wife while plugging his videographer until the National Enquirer broke it. ABC News specifically told their reporters to ignore it and documented it.
Obama was the media’s high watermark for mendacity. The LA Times covering up his meeting with Rashid Khalidi. All of them pretending Jeremiah Wright wasn’t any way connected to him. His weird homosexual past. His fictional autobiography. The cult of personality complete with Jonestown-esque videos of small kids singing that “Obama will show us the way” and celebretards demanding that he tell them how they can better serve his cause. His and Valerie Jareett’s ties to Iran and his college education that was paid for by them.
But to beat them, you need candidates who acknowledge the depths to which that pathetic excuse for a profession has fallen. A bunch of historically illiterate, know nothing know-it-alls who act in bad faith.
It was bad way back too. By the 80’s I had stopped
bothering to read most newspapers or listen to
MSM programming. Then came the end of the “Fairness”
doctrine crap under Reagan and Talk Radio was born.
Thank God for that.
And today we have the internet they are trying to steal.
Don’t let the commies muzzle the truth again or that’s
the end.
“If you’re a ACTUAL journalist and you believe that BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and COMMUNISTIC tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
…FIFY, NYT, YW…
Has the New York Times even bothered to pretend to be objective in recent years?
I stopped subscribing to newspapers way back when the opinions showed up on the Front page, and the facts only showed up on the Opinion page.
The ny times is a house organ of the left, always has been, since defending the soviets. It’s just gotten more obvious, is all.
Eaquire is also political trash.