Our Press Becomes an International Embarrassment

Last time I looked, we have a free press. And yet, somehow or other, our media moguls have decided that being free means doing whatever they please. Obviously, that includes turning the news pages into a propaganda organ for the Democratic Party. America’s press no longer even pretends to be objective. It slanders President Trump whenever and wherever it pleases, while exonerating and lauding Democrats no matter what they do.

We have no laws defining what the press may or may not print. But still, to be a functioning medium the press must retain some semblance of integrity. This is no longer the case. 

Recent stories from the New York Time and other media have suggested that bands of idiot millennials have taken over the newsrooms and, being too stupid to entertain two opposing viewpoints, and too incompetent to mount a serious counterargument to any argument that displeases them, they insist that the paper only presents one point of view. Besides, many of them were hired to fill diversity quotas, and they will never allow any story to appear that suggests as much.

Their minds are running on empty praise, and they will never allow you to intimate otherwise.

Anyway, one awaits with somewhat bated breath the moment when the press going to tell us that we need to vote for Crazy Joe Biden because he alone can command respect and improve America’s standing in the world. (For the record, and for those who are too young to remember, the term Crazy Joe was first applied to a notorious New York gangster, by name of Crazy Joe Gallo. He did not gain the nickname for being senile and demented.)

Anyway, the press will try to persuade us that Crazy Joe, a man who cannot deliver a coherent ad lib, will cause the world to respect American again. And yet, those of us who live in the fishbowl called America should also care about the world’s attitude, not toward our president, but toward the press itself.

Would you believe that a center-right, non-Trumpian Parisian newspaper, called Le Figaro, recently ran a column suggesting that the American press, for systematically covering up the Biden record, has disgraced itself, perhaps irreparably.

Roger Kimball explains:

This was brought home to me by an article that appeared a few days ago in Le Figaro, the biggest newspaper in France. The headline summed up its burden: “La stupéfiante indulgence des grands médias américains envers Joe Biden”—“The stupefying indulgence of big American media towards Joe Biden.”

The author evinced no pro-Trump sympathies. On the contrary. Yet he wrote in amazement at the seamless media distortion that worked to disparage Trump while excusing Biden—a process that “va jusqu’à l’occultation des faits”—goes so far (add an expression of amazement) as to conceal the facts. 

The American media has lost the semblance of integrity. It is so bad that they are noticing it in Paris. The author is stupefied to see how the media indulges the rank senility of Joe Biden.

In truth, it is simply more of what we saw when the media was covering Barack Obama. After all, the current loss of professional ethical standards dates to the Obama administration, when the media fell over itself propagandizing for the greatness of Obama.

One appreciates the author’s command of French, and one does like the expression: occultation des faits. The term does translate well as "conceal," but we note that it’s also used to refer to an eclipse, of the sun, for instance. 

A dark shadow has descended on the American media. It is sad to see it. It is even sadder to have to live through an era when objective reporting has yielded to ideological fanaticism. And has been consumed by a will to impose its views on the nation, regardless.

This morning a newspaper publisher in Hong Kong was arrested for defying the new press laws in that island city state. As we sit back, smugly assuming that it could never happen here, we should recognize that it has been happening here, but without any government edict. The mainstream American media has turned itself into an international embarrassment, all by itself, while pretending to be fair and objective. If you dispute it, it will accuse you of obscuring the facts and ignoring science.