Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne on Monday cheered that journalists are finally taking heat for being too sensitive to the complaints of liberal media bias. No, seriously. Dionne insisted that, since the days of Spiro Agnew, “reporters, editors and producers have incessantly looked over their right shoulders, fearing they’d be assailed as secret carriers of the liberal virus.”
He cheered the fact that the press is now being critiqued as too friendly to conservatives. However, “the 2016 campaign has brought an intense progressive counterattack on media timidity toward the right. Coverage of Donald Trump has become the occasion for a new crisis of credibility.”
Dionne marveled:
There is the matter of Trump's outsize access to television time during the primaries that dwarfed the attention given to his competitors. Liberals insist further that Trump is being held to a much lower standard than is Hillary Clinton, which, in turn, means that while relatively short shrift is given to each new Trump scandal, the same old Clinton scandals get covered again and again.
However, as a Media Research Center study pointed out, TV journalists have deluged viewers with coverage of Trump’s controversies. What they didn’t do early on was something that could have been helpful for GOP primary voters: point out his vast history of supporting liberal causes and Democratic candidates.
While Dionne may think that the problem of liberal media bias is overblown, conservatives clearly don’t. A new Gallup poll found “trust in the media sinks to a new low.” Only 32 percent have trust that reporters will "report the news fully, accurately and fairly.” Gallup revealed, “Republicans who say they have trust in the media has plummeted to 14% from 32% a year ago. This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years.”
Polls show, by a wide margin, Americans see a left-wing bias in the press.
Dionne cited PolitiFact as proof of the media’s new, supposed conservative bias. Yet, the fact checking sit is hardly objective and often fails to go after Clinton’s misstatements. An example? As for scandals in the 2016 race, another MRC study found that David Duke endorsing Trump got six times more coverage than the father of the Orlando terrorist got for endorsing Clinton.
Yet, Dionne laments that liberals are “furious that the right’s own partisan media campaign has intimidated journalistic institutions.”
What world does he live in?
