Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Rebukes Biased US Media

As told to,

       George Sontag

      I've been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn't always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. As for a reporter's opinions, my former editor Abe Rosenthal didn't want them in the news pages and if you put them in, he took them out. They belonged in the opinion pages only, which were managed separately. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner.

      Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame how some news organizations chose to cover the 2016 election. Among the many revelations that last year's election gave us was the revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale and that most of what you read, watch, and listen to, is distorted by intentional bias and hostility.

      I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign, but I was still shocked at what happened. This was not naive liberalism run amok. This was a whole new approach to politics. No one had modern times had seen anything like it. The behavior of much of the media, but especially the New York Times, was a disgrace. I don't believe it ever will recover the public trust it squandered.

      For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and seventies. Fueled by the civil rights and anti Vietnam movements, the media jumped on the anti authority bandwagon. The deal was sealed with Watergate. After that, people became journalists because most of them wanted to be the next one to become famous by bringing down a Republican president.

      In the beginning, Donald Trump's candidacy was treated as an outlandish publicity stunt, as though he wasn't a serious candidate and should be treated as a circus act. But television executives quickly made a surprising discovery, the more they put Trump on the air, the higher their ratings climbed and ratings are money. So news shows started the devoting hours and hours sampling to pointing the cameras at Trump and letting them run.

      As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the game too.

     Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial but may to headline. He made news by being a spectacle and the ratings soared so Trump was given more and more air time. One study estimated that Trump received so much free air time that if he had to buy it, the price would have been two billion. The realization that they had helped Trump's rise seem to make many executives, producers, and journalists furious.

      By the time he had secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, the media were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it could not be Donald Trump. They would make sure of that. The coverage of him grew so vicious and one sided that last August I wrote a column on this unprecedented bias. Under the headline “American journalism is collapsing before our eyes,” I wrote that the so called cream of the media crop was engaged in a naked display of partisanship designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.

      The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast.

Day in, day out, in every medium market in America, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching a total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction - for Clinton and away from Trump.

      Consider this, the country is roughly divided 50-50 between people who will vote for a Democrat and people who will vote for Republican but our national media is more like 80-20 in favor of the Democrats. While the media should, in theory, broadly reflect the public, it doesn't. Too much of the media acts like a special interest group. Detached from the greater good, it exists to promote its own interest and the political party which is it is aligned.

     Let me be very clear again, The behavior of much of the media, but especially the New York Times, was (and is) a disgrace. I don't believe it ever will recover the public trust it squandered. 

     The future of fair journalism isn't all gloom and doom. If we accept the new reality of widespread bias and seize the potential it offers, there is room for optimism. Support fair and factual media outlets. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects true public preferences would, in time, create a more level political and cultural landscape. That would be a great thing.

Michael Goodwin-chief political columnist for the New York Post. Pulitzers prize winner, he worked for 16 years at the New York Times.