NewsBusters Time Machine

Much as we’re seeing today, in 2016 liberal reporters and commentators savaged Donald Trump’s first group of appointees as “radical” and “racist” “ignoramuses” who “disdain the missions of their assigned agencies.”

Three years ago, the liberal media trumpeted how a new Georgia law would “make it harder to vote,” “restrict voting rights” or amounted to “voter suppression.” This week’s record turnout showed those claims were utterly wrong.

Even after all of the votes have been cast, network correspondents present the results through the lens of their own biases — cheering when a Democrat wins, and snarling about imaginary dirty tricks when the voters back a Republican.

Thanks to the outsized role that “the media” — that’s the news media, entertainment media, and social media — play in our national discourse, the vacuous and vulgar pronouncements of left-wing celebrities are widely promoted as if they were actually important contributions to the political dialogue.

At this point in the 2016 election, the liberal media were sure that their months of hostile negative coverage had succeeded in destroying Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidency.

For the four years of his presidency, the media savaged Trump’s immigration policies as “cruel,” “evil,” “inhumane,” “torture” and “profoundly racist.” Yet polls show Trump besting Harris by wide margins on the issue, suggesting the Biden administration’s abject incompetence has been more persuasive than years of media rhetoric.

One year ago (October 7, 2023), Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israeli communities and murdered nearly 1,200 individuals, including babies. Yet the media quickly shifted to deploring Israel’s military campaign to remove Hamas’s capability to ever commit such an atrocity in the future.

Eighteen years ago tonight, ABC News revealed that Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley had sent lewd text messages to underage congressional pages. ABC, CBS and NBC spent a huge amount of airtime over the following weeks trumpeting the scandal, the idea being that Foley’s bad behavior could bring down Republicans all across the country.

Adding to the stakes of who wins in November, the big issue in 2025 will be the expiration of the Trump tax cuts. A look back at the media’s performance seven years ago, as the reform package moved through Congress, shows the liberal media’s raging hostility to lower tax rates.

Four years ago this week, the media elite despaired that the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would shift the balance of power on the Supreme Court to the right.

Using the media's coverage of Donald Trump’s three debates with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 as a guide, expect the press on Tuesday night to adore Kamala Harris’s performance, while deriding Trump as someone out of a “third world” “banana republic.”

In the last eight years, the media have left their biased fingerprints all over the news, starting with their hostile coverage of Trump. Yet our archives are full of quotes from journalists insisting that they have no partisan axe to grind.

Democratic presidential nominees have never had a problem finding friendly journalists who will toss easy softballs, inviting the nominee to bash their Republican opponent while showcasing their own warm wonderfulness.

The Democratic Convention begins tomorrow in Chicago, and there should be absolutely no suspense over how the media will treat Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and the party’s other stars. The MRC’s archives, going back to 1988, show that Democrats always get a huge tailwind of good press coming out of their party conventions.