Journalists Publicly Embrace One-Sided Political Reporting

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we examine calls for the mainstream media to be more critical of Republicans, analyze the media’s coverage of the death of Colin Powell, and highlight more media misses.

Journalists are Telling on Themselves

Reporters from several mainstream-media outlets outed themselves as biased conduits of information over the weekend when they excitedly promoted a Los Angeles Times column that argued journalists are “failing the public with ‘both-siderism’ in political coverage.”

Columnist Jackie Calmes laments how “journalist pressure” to be balanced keeps reporters from writing “the new truth.”

She calls out journalists and pundits who “focus critically on President Biden and Democrats” but “give short shrift to Republicans’ obstructions — as if the cancer of Trumpism was in remission, if not cured.”

Calmes’ argument is one that has been made repeatedly since 2016, most prominently by journalist Wesley Lowery: The core journalistic ethic of presenting both sides of a public debate using the best facts available is in fact cover for the system of white supremacy that undergirds American society and produced President Donald Trump.

Wrapped up in a moral panic, mainstream outlets dropped the ball again and again, including when reporting on the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. And the approach wasn’t limited to covering Trump and his campaign, it was wielded against his supporters. In the case of the Covington Catholic controversy, those supporters were children whose lives were derailed after a host of mainstream media outlets jumped on an edited social-media clip to paint them as MAGA hat-wearing white supremacists — only to ignore or downplay subsequent video that showed the students were being harassed by a Native American man.

Calmes and others rewrite history and refuse to acknowledge how this foray into one-sided journalism has impacted public trust in the fourth estate. Instead, she is quick to drag Republicans for not being “serious about governing or addressing the nation’s actual problems, as opposed to faux ones like critical race theory.”

As journalists became increasingly comfortable with abandoning the tradition of objectivity they inherited, trust in the media continued to plummet. In the five years after Trump was elected, the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations was slashed in half — 70 percent in 2016 compared to 35 percent earlier this year, according to Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, 58 percent of U.S. adults say they have at least some trust in the information that comes from national news organizations — the smallest share over the past five years that the question was asked.

Journalists, including “1619 project” author Nikole Hannah-Jones, celebrated the article, lauding it as a new guiding material for covering politics.

Hannah-Jones, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, claimed “every political journalist should read this and the book ‘How Democracies Die.’”

New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer said, “Good point from longtime reporter @JackieCalmes: Missing from much political coverage is that only one party is even trying to govern.”

The hive-mind willingness to abandon tried and true journalistic ethics came days after Katie Couric admitted to editing out comments Ruth Bader Ginsburg made during an interview accusing those who kneel during the national anthem of showing “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.”

The unprovoked admission of guilt was included in Couric’s newly-released memoir, Going There. According to the Daily Mail, she claims that she threw out the newsworthy quote because she believed the 83-year-old justice was “elderly and probably didn’t fully understand the question.” Couric said she was “protecting” the “Notorious RGB.”

Perhaps then it is no wonder why House speaker Nancy Pelosi feels comfortable scolding members of the media for not doing a “better job” of “selling” Democrats’ massive social-spending package.

Headline Fail of the Week

This week several outlets again turned tragedy into an opportunity to unnecessarily scare the public about COVID-19 when former secretary of state Colin Powell died from complications related to the virus on Monday morning. While Newsweek had possibly the worst headline — Colin Powell Dies From COVID Complications, Was Fully Vaccinated — a slew of outlets were guilty of mentioning Powell’s vaccination status without noting that he had reportedly previously been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that weakens the body’s ability to fight infections.

Media Misses

–Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang became the latest mainstream reporter to display symptoms of what we like to call “DeSantis Derangement Disorder.” She questioned venture capitalist David Sacks on how he could host a fundraiser to support Florida governor Ron DeSantis, given how “divisive” the Republican is. In response, Sacks questioned why DeSantis is “inherently more divisive than, say, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom or someone on the other side of the spectrum?” He added that “you’re not divisive just because you don’t agree with the orthodoxy of Silicon Valley.”

-Ryan Grim of The Intercept considers it “absolutely wild that a guy who literally owns a coal producing business that generates millions for him — currently — can make this kind of decision for the whole country and it’s not illegal.” The “guy” to whom Grim refers is sitting United States senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, and the decision to which he refers is to not rubber stamp a $3.5 trillion spending plan opposed by 51 (a majority) other senators.

-CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta joined the Joe Rogan Experience to discuss the challenges of, and remedies for, the coronavirus pandemic. Gupta was visibly uncomfortable when confronted by the popular podcast host about the cable-news network’s reporting that Rogan had ingested “horse dewormer” in a misguided effort to fight the disease. In fact, Rogan had taken ivermectin, a commonly prescribed, Nobel Prize–winning medication used by 250 million people every year. The doctor admitted on-air that no one should have made such an outrageous accusation of Rogan, but CNN anchor Don Lemon doubled down after the fact, arguing that ​​Rogan “did say something about Ivermectin that I think wasn’t actually correct about CNN and lying. Ivermectin is a drug that is commonly used as a horse dewormer, so it is not a lie to say that the drug is used as a horse dewormer, I think that’s important.”