Recently, the New York Times was caught red-handed planning their coverage of the next two years of the Trump Administration. They have shifted away from the incessant coverage of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative to decrying America, and the President, as irredeemably racist. In a leaked tape, The Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet admits that their mission is not factual journalism. It’s ideologically driven, biased, highly strategized opinion dressed up as news.
The New York Times’s strategy in covering race for the next two years is already being implemented. The Times just launched its 1619 project which is aimed at “observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” The Times writes, “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.” In other words, despite a Civil War and the end of segregation, America is racist and nothing we do will change that.
Yet, this seems like a one-sided telling of American history with the goal of continuing to erode the patriotic spirit of Americans and deem every single American institution as racist through and through. As Jim Geraghty points out in National Review, (despite the fact that the 1619 project is rife with errors) the New York Times focuses on some of the worst tragedies to befall African Americans in our country’s history, yet “then ‘reframes’ the portrait to leave out some of the most consequential and under-discussed African Americans in our history.”
Indeed, the Times seems to disagree with President Lincoln, who stated in his Gettysburg address that, “Our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” If President Lincoln could stand on the blood-soaked grounds of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania after that great battle and believe our nation was conceived in liberty, surely we can see the good in America as well.
Now for years the mainstream media has received much criticism over its liberal bias. It has earned criticism because of its overwhelmingly negative coverage of the Trump Administration. As a result, confidence in the press is at an all-time low.
The Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center conducted a study which measured the media’s coverage of the Trump Administration’s first 100 days in office. The Shorenstein Center measured seven media outlets including CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Fox News. In Trump’s first 100 days, “CNN and NBC’s coverage was the most unrelenting—negative stories about Trump outpaced positive ones by 13-to-1 on the two networks. Trump’s coverage on CBS also exceeded the 90 percent mark. Trump’s coverage exceeded the 80 percent level in The New York Times (87 percent negative) and The Washington Post (83 percent negative). The Wall Street Journal came in below that level (70 percent negative).”
The Shorenstein Center also found that “Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days was not merely negative in overall terms. It was unfavorable on every dimension. There was not a single major topic where Trump’s coverage was more positive than negative.”
Furthering the evidence of the bias of the press, “Of the past four presidents, only Barack Obama received favorable coverage during his first 100 days” which averaged 59 percent favorable to 41 percent unfavorable.
In addition, according to the Center for Public Integrity, during the 2016 election journalists donated $396,000 to presidential campaigns of which $382,000, or 96 percent, benefited Hillary Clinton.
And who can forget the numerous instances of journalists promoting pseudo-events over the course of this year alone. The Washington Post and others badly mangled the Covington Catholics story. ABC News ran with the fake Jussie Smollett story giving him endless press coverage and an exclusive interview. And recall when Georgia lawmaker Rep. Erica Thomas posted a Facebook video of herself sobbing uncontrollably after a man allegedly told her to “go back where she came from.” Rep. Thomas attempted to tie President Trump to the man’s comments. Many media outlets including the NBC News, and Time magazine promoted that story even though it was completely contrived, and the man she was accusing came out as a Democrat who will “vote Democrat for the rest of [his] life.” Yet as soon as the real facts appeared, the story disappeared from the media narrative as if it never happened.
These examples, along with countless others show that we no longer have a free press. We have a politically-aligned, partisan and overwhelmingly liberal press. According to one study 58 percent of journalists identify as liberals while only 4 percent identify as conservatives.
It’s time for Americans to have their free press back. That’s why The Daily Citizen exists to inform, inspire and equip you to engage a culture that seems more hostile day by day. Let us follow the exhortation of President Lincoln who said, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
