Democracy suffers when the media can’t be trusted

Believe it or not, journalists are not at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to being trusted the least by the American public. According to the most recent annual Gallup poll of attitudes towards various professions, those ranked lower than the press include lawyers, insurance and car salespeople, business executives, stockbrokers, advertisers and (no surprise) politicians. Members of Congress have the dubious distinction of being the worst of the lot with only 6% of the public having a high degree of trust in them.

That 19% of the public still trusts journalists is surprising but nothing to boast about. Indeed, it could be argued that the fact that less than a fifth of the citizenry have faith in what they read, hear and see via the news media is even worse than the low totals for some other professions. After all, you may not trust those who sell you insurance, cars or stocks, but they do sell items that presumably have some value. But if you don’t believe a word you read in The New York Times or hear from, say, ABC News, then nothing they do is worth a cent. Given the vital theoretical role that a free press plays in a functioning democracy in terms of its ability to keep the government and other powerful institutions honest and accountable, a widespread belief that the media is not only untrustworthy but in the pockets of the state undermines any notion that we live in a truly free country.

"The ability of the left to dominate the national conversation undermines the long-held belief that journalists play a key role in the democratic process."

We got a reminder of why that matters in this week’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. I would argue that it didn’t fundamentally alter the widespread conclusion (shared by me) that Harris got much the better of the confrontation. Still, the decision of the two ABC News moderators—David Muir and Linsey Davis—to blatantly take her side throughout the two-hour slog didn’t just call into question the fairness of the disputation. It was also a confirmation of the bias of the two journalists and their network.

An increasingly woke profession

This is a familiar theme to supporters of Israel, who have watched with dismay in recent decades as unfair coverage of the Jewish state has fueled efforts to delegitimize its existence and right to defend itself while demonizing virtually everything it does. In the past year since the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, this bias has been particularly painful as supposedly credible publications and networks have acted as the enablers of Hamas terrorists, repeating every lie about Israel the murderers and rapists utter. This is not merely unhelpful to Israel’s cause. It has become a major factor in the surge in antisemitism felt in the streets of American cities and on university campuses where anti-Israel, pro-Hamas mobs have targeted Jews.

All of this means that no matter who you plan to vote for in November or what you think of Harris and Trump, the collapse of media credibility must be seen as a potentially lethal threat to American democracy and Jewish life. At this point, it’s not enough to merely decry media bias and seek to get outlets to correct their mistakes, as important as that task may be. We must understand how and why this bias, which can make itself felt in both domestic political arguments as well as those involving foreign policy, has come about. More to the point, as is the case with the collapse of higher education due to its takeover by woke ideologues, it’s high time for more consumers of the news to simply stop pretending as if the liberal corporate press should be trusted at all.

That almost all of what is loosely called the legacy media, which includes mainstream publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, broadcast networks and cable-news outlets like CNN and MSNBC—leans increasingly hard to the left is not seriously questioned by anyone but the journalists themselves and hard-core leftists who complain they aren’t biased enough against conservatives, and especially, Trump. Since he won the 2016 election and following the moral panic induced by the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, many practitioners of journalism at these outlets are ready to say openly that they view their purpose as being essentially political activism and not the objective pursuit of truth.

What that means is that they use their bully pulpits to skew news coverage to make political and ideological points, covering up for politicians they favor and ruthlessly smearing those they dislike. Whereas previous generations of journalists could be said to lean left, for the most part, they understood that the public wanted them to report the news fairly and at least sought to pretend to do so, even when they showed bias. The younger generation of journalists (in contrast to the past, when they were more likely to come from the working class and not have college degrees or sometimes even high school ones) is almost always the recipients of education at elite institutions. There they were indoctrinated in woke myths about race, intersectionality and unquestioning belief in "progressive" political causes. And like the situation on so many campuses, this creates a groupthink atmosphere in newsrooms in which mobs bully dissenters into silence or out the door.

There are plenty of places where the liberal conventional wisdom of the day is questioned, albeit usually in smaller outlets that struggle to gain the respect the legacy media takes for granted. Though there are conservative publications and networks—not to mention talk-radio shows, where the other side of the arguments of the day can be aired, and which, of course, exhibit their own brand of bias—the left’s dominance over most of what is termed mainstream media is almost complete. The ties between these journalistic institutions and those that serve the political and foreign-policy establishments, not to mention popular culture and the arts, are close.

Journalists fueling antisemitism

The ability of the left to dominate the national conversation undermines the long-held belief that journalists play a key role in the democratic process, by which the policies of any government can be held up to scrutiny and candidates can similarly expect to be held accountable. If mainstream journalists are only doing this to one side of the political divide while giving a pass to the other, especially when already in power, the public is given the impression that what we have is not a free press but a state media that can be expected to toe the party line in the same manner as authoritarian or totalitarian regimes.

"A uniformly partisan press seems more like a state regime media than the free press needed to continue the unique American experiment in government."

The same process applies to the coverage of Israel and antisemitism. It is almost universally expected now that the Jewish state’s efforts to defend itself—even against the barbaric tactics of a genocidal Islamist terrorist group like Hamas and its tyrannical Iranian backers—will always be covered unfairly. In the past, most media bias against Israel was rooted in ignorance, sloppiness and the natural inclination of journalists to always tell a story from the side of the perceived underdog, which, despite the size and power of the forces arrayed against the one small Jewish nation on the planet, is the way the world views the Palestinian Arabs who seek to destroy it.

In recent years, it’s become clear that the problem with the coverage of Israel is more a matter of ideology than a lack of knowledge about the history of the conflict in the Middle East. Just as the left’s stranglehold on college faculties and administrations has created an atmosphere in which most professors and students believe the intersectional lie that Israel is an illegitimate "settler/colonial" state of "white" oppressors, the same is now true of the liberal media, most of whose personnel have already received the same indoctrination.

The cost of media bias

Concerning the Harris-Trump contest, the decision of the ABC moderators to "fact check" Trump in real time put them in the position of abandoning the role of neutral arbiters and askers of questions. At least one of them, Muir, at times, seemed to be an active participant in the debate in which he sought to assist Harris. Trump’s usual employment of hyperbole, which is often loosely connected to the objective facts, leaves him open to fact-checking.

But the same could be said of Harris, whose not insignificant list of whoppers included the recycling of lies about Trump calling neo-Nazis "very fine people" or threatening a literal bloodbath of the citizenry if he was returned to office; opposition to IVF procedures; or his connection to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (which was itself mischaracterized). That those weren’t challenged and her own statements characterizing antisemitic, pro-Hamas mobs as, for all intents and purposes, "very fine people," illustrate that the proceedings were skewed in her favor. Muir and Davis were deserving of fact checks, too, since they lied about state abortion laws and mindlessly repeated Hamas’s false statistics about Palestinian casualties in Gaza.

The two moderators clearly feared being the recipients of the abuse hurled at CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who, despite being personally on the left, played it down the middle without any partisan "fact checks," when they moderated the June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, during which the latter self-destructed.

That doesn’t mean that Harris didn’t best the unfocused and easily distracted Trump in the debate. Nor does it necessarily dictate that she ought not to win the election. But it did send a signal to the half of the country that is inclined to support Trump that they shouldn’t take seriously anything said or published about the race on ABC or any other mainstream outlet.

It is axiomatic that we are now a bifurcated nation in which the two opposing political camps read, listen and watch different journalistic institutions, and therefore have no common language or even a consensus about the objective facts about the news of the day. It is in such a milieu that the basic premise of democracy—in which we must consent to agree to disagree with our opponents and treat them as well-meaning if wrong—breaks down. By the same token, the division in the media about Israel, with many liberal outlets smearing it while many on the right defend it, also foments an atmosphere in which a significant percentage of the country is willing to believe lies about the Jewish state and incline them towards antisemitism here at home.

Liberals may have cheered the moderators for turning the debate into a three-on-one confrontation in which their version of the "truth" was employed against their "bad orange man" bête noire. If Trump voters and many independents no longer believe anything that is heard on liberal outlets, theirs may well be a pyrrhic triumph.

We may be able to survive as a constitutional republic without honest lawyers, salespeople and most politicians viewed as crooks, as they have all been since the days of the Founding Fathers. However, a uniformly partisan press, especially when local news outlets are dying out and most political discourse is conducted in a virtual public square owned by a few Silicon Valley oligarchs who collude with the liberal press and the Democrats, seems more like a state regime media than the free press needed to continue the unique American experiment in government. That is a formula for the hollowing out, if not the end of democracy as well as a likely continued increase of antisemitism. That is a prospect that ought to scare everyone, no matter who they plan to vote for in the November elections.

© JNS