When Did Media Bias Become a Virtue?
Liberal dismay about the New York Daily News’ scaling back its front-page campaign against Trump exposes the underside of a partisan press
By Jonathan S. Tobin — March 10, 2017
Nobody expects tabloid covers to be a source of great insight. The two surviving New York City tabs — the New York Daily News and the New York Post — have long used their front pages to make editorial points or just to savage figures their publishers didn’t like, whether the criticism was fair or not. So the fact that the liberal paper — the News — chose to pour scorn and bile on the campaign and the person of Donald Trump throughout the 2016 presidential campaign while the conservative Post was generally supportive of him was not particularly shocking.
What is surprising — and, indeed, ought to shock journalists who care about their profession — is the way the staff of the News, along with other journalists, reacted to the decision on the part of the paper’s publishers to scale back its assault on Trump once he was elected president. They had no problem with their newspaper’s using its front page and news section, as well as their opinion columns and editorials, to bash Trump. But once it decided to tone down the abuse, albeit while still regularly attacking him, the News’ staff didn’t treat this as an example of a newspaper trying to regain at least a smidgen of objectivity. No, they have made it clear — as a feature sympathetic to the paper’s rebels in Politico indicates — that this more measured if still critical attitude toward the president is a sign that the paper has lost its integrity.
That may make sense in the world of mainstream-media journalism, where anything less than open bias against conservatives (or against anyone who offends liberal sensibilities, such as Trump) is not considered objective. But when journalists are exposed in this fashion, it must strike the rest of the country as yet another reason to view the media with distrust, if not outright hostility.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/445675/print