OPINION:
President Obama, still on the scout for meaning in what happened to the Democrats in November, suggests now that Hillary Clinton lost because of media bias. If the president actually believes that, he’s surely the only man in America who does.
The major media made a virtue of trying to destroy Donald Trump. Some of the reporters even admitted — boasted, actually — that they allowed her campaign minions to edit their copy. Their “editing” might have made their copy smoother and more readable, but at the price no reputable correspondent would pay.
Mr. Obama’s mistrust of the media is shared by millions of Americans, but not because the media has been too hard on him, his policies or Mrs. Clinton. Their mistrust stems from their observation that the major media had been splashing in Hillary’s tank for months.
In September, the Gallup organization reported that fewer Americans trust in the media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” than at any time in the history of Gallup polling, which goes back seven decades, and that self-identified Republican trust in the media had dropped from 32 percent to a mere 14 percent in just one year.
That distrust increased as the campaign wore on. The virulence of the attacks, not only on the Republican candidate but on the deplorables who intended to vote for him. Distrust persuaded many of the deplorables to refuse to share their feelings with reporters, pollsters or even their neighbors. It wasn’t just Hillary who regarded deplorables trying to find work in “flyover country” as “deplorables,” but everyone in the Hillary campaign who dismissed them as too dumb to understand why the liberal world view was the only legitimate view.
Inside the bubble where Mr. Obama and the Democrats live, everyone toes the “progressive” line. Refusing to parrot the party line is a sign not just of bias, but of evil. If they’re not brainwashed by the “alt-right,” the skeptics are racists, bigots or willing agents of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
The Washington Post, which promoted the notion that Donald Trump is evil and so is everyone who sups on his poison, attacked the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns 173 television stations, the other day as if it were the tail of the Trump campaign.
The Post’s Paul Farhi, acting as ombudsman for everybody else, scolded Sinclair for arranging interviews with Mr. Trump for its local affiliates. This was said to have “helped Donald Trump’s campaign.” This is what reporters are paid to do, to interview candidates and let them speak for themselves. But this year right-thinking correspondents reported from the tank, never wasting an opportunity to tell readers and viewers how much they detested the Republican candidate.
In better times than these, Sinclair would have been seen as merely practicing aggressive journalism — by getting reporters from its local affiliates as close to the action as possible. Some reporters settled for spoon-feeding at Clinton headquarters, where Hillary presided with a big spoon.
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