I listened with an open mind to this illuminating interview between Bari Weiss at the Free Press and Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, two of the founders of Axios, about how the public lost trust in the media.
As we watch them scramble to explain why they covered up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, what we see instead of an apology is an excuse.
There has never been any real reckoning of what happened to them after Trump won in 2016, all through his first term, especially in 2020, when they lost much of the public’s trust for good.
The legacy media took a side, but worse, they positioned themselves as superior to the other side, which meant that not only weren’t they chasing the story, but they weren’t paying attention to those who were.
The Biden/Trump debate was Toto pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz. There was not much they could do after that. The jig was up.
It didn’t break news for anyone who got their news outside the bubble, however. There, the media is endlessly mocked for its pandering, weakness, and propaganda.
How it Started
How it’s going:
The opening paragraphs:
The collective post-debate gloating from conservatives is in full swing this week, as Democrats reckon with the ongoing political fallout. But the immediate response on the right has focused less on the fact of Biden’s potential mental decline than on alleging that Democrats and the mainstream press colluded to hide it.
That’s the kinder, gentler explanation. The alternative is that they are SO BAD at their jobs, such terrible reporters, so in the tank for one political party that they couldn’t see what was right in front of them for four years. Pick one.
It’s hard to sympathize when so many of us were left twisting in the wind, dealing with major issues in American life, from COVID to the protests to lockdowns to the woke madness in our schools. We needed a legacy press that would tell us the truth, not do the bidding of one political party.
True, they could have lost their jobs for it. That happened everywhere. Reporters lost their jobs for a headline, “Buildings Matter Too.” Donald McNeil lost his job at the New York Times because some overly fragile brat tattled on him and accused him of being a racist. But so what? Someone had to stand up for objectivity and journalism, didn’t they?
What Happened to Me
The mania around race and racism was on a low simmer after Trump won the first time. Cancel culture was in full swing. We’d already gone through the first wave of a mass hysteria episode around the Me Too movement. But none of that could compare to what happened to us when we were all locked down from COVID and the George Floyd video hit the internet.
It was seen by millions all over the world within minutes. Right after the video hit, a fake image of Derek Chauvin wearing a “Make America White Again” MAGA hat also made the rounds, driving up the rage meter just before the largest protest in American history erupted on the streets, breaking lockdowns and forcing the Left to pivot from social distancing to masks.
It would be days before the story of the fake photo was corrected. Probably even now, many still believe it was real.
The tweet is still up:
I still had one foot in my old world then. The blue-check aristocracy ruled Twitter, and I was still a loyal Joe Biden supporter.
I had been in a panic about the violence that came like clockwork every night after the peaceful protests came to an end. The media wasn’t covering it. No one would talk about it. I thought it was so bad that it would easily hand Trump a second win.
The majority of the public favored military intervention if the protests could not be controlled to protect citizens and businesses. So Bari Weiss and James Bennett did what any responsible journalist would do - they reflected most Americans' views by asking Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed for the most trusted news outlet in the land.
And just like that, words as violence became our new normal.
I remember how the lie that Jacob Blake was unarmed and “there to break up a fight” hit social media. Kenosha burned to the ground, people died, and none of it was true. It took months for that narrative to be corrected.
For so many of us, nothing would ever be the same after that Summer.
I can track my transformation using the WayBack machine, though no single tweet from that Summer was recorded. Only one from May, where I’m wearing a t-shirt with Joe Biden buttons on it:
And one from late September:
And finally, from November:
The legacy media abandoned us that Summer. We all now know why. Their desire to take down Trump was more important than telling us the truth.
Even now, members in the mainstream press are defiant and defensive when called out for being overt activists for the Democrats.
Chris Cilizza, for instance, is one of the few reporters who did talk about Biden’s age, like the Axios reporter, so much so that his readers complained about it. This story of his, But Her Emails, answers whether he covered Biden’s age more than Hillary Clinton’s email server from one year ago.
He wrote:
He admits that their objective was to stop Trump. They believed that was their job after they were blamed in 2016 for helping Trump win.
Recently, Cilizza was on Twitter defending himself:
Well, that might be something we could all accept if it were not for all of the “mistakes” or outright lies from 2020 and during Trump’s term. The only reason they’re even talking about this is because the debate exposed them.
Had Kamala Harris prevailed, none of them would be talking about this. George Clooney would be taking a victory lap. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and NBC/ABC/CBS News would never feel pressured to explain what they knew and when they knew it.
The truth is that the Right was all over this story. No one should be giving credit to the small number of journalists who tip-toed around it. It’s like that scene in Quiz Show in Congress when every Senator praises Charles Van Doren who finally admits he cheated, except one, who lets him have it in no uncertain terms.
Had the legacy media given journalists the credit they deserve on the right, they would not be in this mess now.
Hit Pieces as Public Show Trials
In Communist countries, public displays of punishment were used to keep people in line. Hit pieces against those suspected of being “far right” function much the same way. They are both a warning to stay away and a threat of what might happen if you dare associate with them.
In 2020, the New York Times ran a hit piece on Real Clear Politics:
This was funny, considering what happened to the public perception of the New York Times polling for the 2016 election.
In a late October 2024 story, the New York Times once again tries to hit at and discredit Real Clear Politics:
John Nolte of Breitbart came in with a broom and a dustpan and cleaned up the mess:
So please tell me how any reasonable person can come out of that not reading John Nolte because he writes for Breitbart but trusting the New York Times, which was clearly trying to tilt the race for the Democrats while still pretending objectivity. What to do, what to do.
It is their sneering of the Right that cost them their credibility because, in their world, people like John Nolte are scorched earth. That’s why they run hit pieces because they have power to destroy anyone’s reputation overnight. Or should I say, had power.
When you see that Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, and Michael Schellenberg all had hit pieces written about them too by high-minded, self-important, so-called “journalists,” you realize that it can now be seen as a badge of honor.
It wasn’t just that they went to war on Trump. It was that they helped perpetuate the false narrative that Trump’s rise was driven by white supremacy and that he was a racist. Therefore, everyone who voted for him was a racist, and anyone who associated with them was also a racist.
Once they internalized that story and began pushing it as the official story, they, like almost everything else on the Left, destroyed their own brand.
From a story in City Journal, An Obit for Journalism, here is how things are looking at the Times:
Losing the Public’s Trust
When I look back on 2020, I see one lie after another sold to us, the unsuspecting public who deserved better. The 51 experts on the Hunter Biden laptop. Russiagate. The generals. COVID leaked from a lab was racist, attempting to close the border from China was racist, the photo op story that was debunked, “Jacob Blake was unarmed,” and on and on it went.
Did they think we were that stupid? Did they think we would not notice?
Two of my best friends in the world died during COVID. One overdosed on heroin. The other had a sudden heart attack in his 50s. I was not allowed to talk about the reasons why they died. I had to go along with the official story that lockdowns were not causing suicides, and the vaccine wasn’t causing heart attacks.
My nephew came all the way from Thailand after having survived COVID, but because he wasn’t vaccinated, members of my family lost their minds and told him he could not visit. When I told them getting COVID was better than the vaccine, they countered by sending me links to NBC, ABC, CBS News. Long after COVID ended, they would all find out for themselves that the media was not telling them the truth.
What happened to me and so many other people is that we were all crawling through a desert looking for an oasis of truth, anyone who would tell us what was happening after years of being lied to and micromanaged by the Democrats and their propaganda press. I found that, just not inside the bubble of the Left. I had to crawl out of it.
Here are some reporters and voices who covered the big stories the legacy press mostly ignored.
Julio Rosas on the ground covering the 2020 protests and riots:
Mollie Hemingway’s astonishing book about the 2020 election.
The medical scandal of the century:
The Twitter Files:
The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop.
Sharyl Attkisson has been reporting on media mistakes all through the Trump era:
And this Tucker Carlson video covering the protests in 2020 has 8 million views.
At least on the Right, they do not pretend not to have bias, and even there, they are not afraid to push back against the status quo.
Here is Megyn Kelly and the guys from Real Clear Politics, Carl Cannon and Tom Bevan, who were unafraid to discuss their opinions without allegiance to the Right, something you never see on the Left.
The message to the media is not complicated: Stop seeing yourselves as better than the Right or those in the independent lane. You’re not better. You’re not better people. You are not more decent. You are not smarter. You are not better reporters.
Or, in simpler terms, get over yourselves.
If the collapse of traditional media in the Trump era proves anything, it’s that the world has changed, and no one has a monopoly on truth or information. May the most reliable voices win.
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