Trump and the Long History of Media Bias

The new excuse for the U.S. mainstream media to violate its professional principles of objectivity and balance in covering this presidential race is that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault, or as The New York Times put it, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.”

But that is just the latest dodge for American journalists who don’t really believe in the principle of evenhandedness. Many have been slanting their coverage for as long as I can remember in my nearly four decades covering news in Washington.

Indeed, bias and outright dishonesty have long been the norm for major American news outlets, especially in the fabrication of foreign monsters around the world for the U.S. military to seek out and destroy.

The truth is that at virtually every spin of America’s revolving wheel of “enemies,” The New York Times could write a similar headline blaming the foreign leaders, just as the newspaper did Trump: “Putin Tests the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism” or Bashar al-Assad or Saddam Hussein or any other designated villain du jour.

In the Times’ framing of the problem, it’s not the journalists who have a responsibility to maintain “the norms of objectivity”; it is Trump or some foreign villain who “tests” the norms. The journalists are the victims here, with their high standards being put under unfair pressure.

But I can’t remember a time when major U.S. news outlets approached a foreign policy issue with anything approaching objectivity or balance. With very few exceptions, the pattern is to fall in line behind the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s propaganda.

Indeed, when some of us have tried to apply objective or even-handed standards to foreign controversies, we faced resistance and punishment from our own news organizations.

Amendment 1:: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

does not establish a ceiling over the rights of the people. Rather, as

Amendment 9:: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

makes plain, it is to be understood only as a floor under our rights. The trouble we have with journalism stems from two sources:

journalism IS as bias:
- ”If it bleeds, it leads”’
- ”'Man Bites Dog,’ not ‘Dog Bites Man’”
combine with the claim, notwithstanding journalism’s stipulation of the above, that
- "All journalists are objective"
to force the conclusion that journalism is not merely negative, but cynical.
All major journalism outlets are associated with each other. They have been associated, and therefore in cahoots, since the advent of the Associated Press in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

Wire service journalism (it does not matter that the AP has competition from other wire services since all journalists have the same incentives and motives, and the result of any wire service will inevitably be essentially the same) empowers and frees from the threat of ideological competition all journalists. So they express cynicism, which is precisely what a “liberal” politician expresses: “you didn’t build that” is pure cynicism.

The legal Achilles Heel of the wire services is that they are patently conspiracies in restraint of trade, and in the 21^st Century, its mission - the conservation of expensive long-distance transmission bandwidth in disseminating the news - is obsolete. Any Tom, Dick, and Jim Robinson can afford the bandwidth now. And therefore the AP, which was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945, is not now, as it was then, inherently too big to fail. Of course, without Scalia . . .

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