Before the Articles of Impeachment even reached the Senate, liberal journalists on broadcast and cable news insisted that any trial would be illegitimate without witnesses. Who’d ever heard of a trial without witnesses, they asked? As it turns out, their counterparts from 1999 had. Back then, journalists were adamant that any witnesses in President Clinton’s Senate trial would needlessly prolong a process whose outcome was essentially predetermined anyway.
As NewsBusters has shown previously, TV journalists in the '90s were all in against impeachment. But the glaring difference between the media then and the media now becomes all the more pronounced when the two are placed side-by-side. See the video below:
Of course, many politicians who were around during the Clinton years appear to have reversed their thinking completely on impeachment now that the President is a Republican. Although such naked partisanship is almost to be expected of politicians these days, it ought not to be expected of the supposedly objective news media.
The current impeachment trial looks in many ways like the inverse of its '90s equivalent. But for all the flip-flopping taking place, the media still sound just as much like the Democrats as they did during the Clinton years.
