That Mr. Trump should've won the presidency [in 2016] largely by denouncing the media should have suggested to leading journalists and media executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong. Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their worst instincts.Swaim could've included all of the untruths that filled our newspapers and airwaves surrounding, inter alia, the Russian collusion hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Trump's alleged "authoritarianism," and his pandemic response. Little wonder allegations of "Fake News" emanating from the White House had such resonance with folks who believed, perhaps naively, that the media have an ethical obligation to present the truth and let the people decide for themselves how they should respond to it.
Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump's unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true.
The repeal of "net neutrality," an Obama-era regulation on internet service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it didn't). The administration built "cages" in which to cram children of illegal border crossers (it didn't). The president praised neo-Nazis as "very fine people" (he didn't). His postmaster general was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie).
In retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans believed Mr. Trump's fictitious claims about the election.
Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.
On the contrary, much of our media and its fellow-travelers on the left saw it as their duty to employ whatever means were necessary, no matter how dishonest, to damage and destroy a Republican president and his administration.
Rather than charitably giving the president the benefit of the doubt they put the worst possible construction on whatever he said or did to make him look as malign and as incompetent as possible. Rather than hold him to the same standard to which they held Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, they condemned in Trump what they ignored in his Democratic predecessors. Rather than tout his many successes along with criticisms of his failures, we heard from many precincts of the media only about his shortcomings and faults.
Any other president, for instance, who brokered the Abraham Accords, the first public normalization of relations between an Arab country and Israel since that of Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, would surely be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama was given the prize simply for talking about peace, but Trump's actual achievement, an amazing historical feat that eluded every president for the past 30 years, hardly rates a mention in our press.
Folks who got their news solely from CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times could be forgiven for thinking that the four years of Trump were an unmitigated disaster for the country. The truth is the Trump administration actually accomplished much more good than did any president in recent memory, but we rarely heard about it because it didn't fit the media narrative.
Mr. Biden talks about "bringing us back together," but it's an absurd aspiration as long as over half the country doesn't, and can't, trust the media to fairly and honestly report the truth.
