Media justify anti-Trump bias, claim he’s too ‘dangerous’ for normal rules, by Howard Kurtz.
The media’s legions of Trump-bashers are finally acknowledging the obvious. And trying their best to justify it.
But there’s one problem: Tilting against one candidate in a presidential election can’t be justified. …
They lose their credibility by pretending to be fair, when it has become plain to everyone that they are not. This US presidential campaign has been unprecedented in may ways, but add this: the western media openly admits to being hopelessly biased towards political correctness.
This is about the mainstream media’s reporters, editors and producers, whose credo is supposed to be fairness. And now some of them are flat-out making the case for unfairness — an unprecedented approach for an unprecedented campaign.
Put aside, for the moment, the longstanding complaints about journalists being unfair to Republicans. They never treated Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush or Bob Dole like this.
Keep in mind that the media utterly misjudged Trump from the start, covering him as a joke or a sideshow or a streaking comet that would burn itself out. ….
Liberal investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald recently told Slate that “the U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”—and, given his views, he has no problem with that.
Now comes Jim Rutenberg, in his first season as media columnist for the New York Times. … “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”
Yet normal standards, says Rutenberg, may not apply. …
Oh no, normal standards do not apply when, yuck, a non-PC person might be elected. Changing the rules when your side might not win … is called cheating.
If a reporter believes Trump is a threat to America, he or she should go into the opinion business, or quit the media world and work against him. You can’t maintain the fig leaf of neutral reporting and favor one side.
While the Republican candidate was chosen by the media and paid lip-service to political correctness, the media could keep a vague semblance of impartiality. But a candidate representing their cultural opponents/victims is too much, and they are outright lying in their presentation of information to the US voters — and now admitting it.
