History Repeats Itself

By

        Zeno Potas

       Overall news coverage of the president in the news media has been negative since he took office in January 2017. The Media Research Center has reported that from last June 1 to Sept. 30 it monitored the TV network evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC and found that 92 percent of news coverage of President Trump during this period was negative. The center called this “the most hostile coverage of a President in TV history.” A former executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, says the paper’s news pages, the home of its straight-news coverage, have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.”

The Times and the media has long faced accusations of liberal bias, even before Trump got into politics and became its harshest critic. But Abramson’s words carry special weight because she is also a former Times Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal correspondent specializing in investigative reporting. No president since Abraham Lincoln has faced the kind of unending bias and hostility from the media that he is living through.

Here are some comments about our president printed in the news media;

• “Within 90 days from inauguration, the Republican Party will be utterly ruined and destroyed. His path is environed with so many difficulties, that even if he had the ability of Jefferson and the energy of Jackson, he would fail, but he is a weak and inexperienced man, and his administration will be doomed from the commencement.”

• “If he takes that radical section of the Republican Party, the conservative wing of it will cut loose and repudiate him. If, on the other hand, he courts the conservatives and pursues a moderate conciliatory policy, the radicals will make open war upon his administration.”

• “….is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity… and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.”

• ….“his election was a rash experiment, his administration is a deplorable failure.”

• “As President of the United States he must have enough sense to see and acknowledge he has been an egregious failure. One thing must be self-evident to him, and that is that under no circumstances can he hope to be the next President of the United States … (he should) retire from the position to which, in an evil hour, he was exalted.”

• The President was “evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis."

• Even one general dismissed the President as a... “hack and an idiot...”

       Does any of this sound familiar? Then you a quite the historian as these comments were made over 150 years ago about President Abraham Lincoln. Many news organizations opposed Lincoln from the beginning – much as they have President Trump in our time and the hostility toward Lincoln within the Washington establishment and the political elite was just as ferocious.

       This relentless hostility parallels what President Lincoln had to endure in the media of his day – newspapers and magazines. Just as President Trump rails against “fake news,” President Lincoln felt that a significant front in his war to preserve the Union was against the news media. This made Lincoln highly critical and skeptical of the media.

       According to Noah Brooks, a reporter who had regular access to the president, Lincoln often said "the worst feature about newspapers was that they were so sure to be 'ahead of the hounds,' outrunning events, and exciting expectations which were sure to be disappointed." Sound familiar?

       Today’s never-ending Russia investigation is a perfect example that things have not changed, in fact, when in comes to mainstream media distorting information and telling lies. They have gotten much worse in recent years, It is highly encouraging that more people are starting to see through these lies. It’s time to turn off your television, “Big Brother’s fantasy box,” and do your own research. Read news accounts from all sources especially outside the US propaganda sphere. Use the tools of critical analytical logical reasoning to come to your own conclusions, not the opinions of the talking heads that represent the elite who want nothing more than profit and power. If you are curious about what is happening on our planet. It’s time to wake up