Last March, Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer (N.D.) sent a letter to media executives at “the big three” of ABC, CBS and NBCUniversal ripping into their persistent pattern of media bias. The letter included several questions about newsroom standards, the presidential election coverage of Donald Trump, Trump’s transition and presidency, and of course, Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal.
Some of the questions were as follows:
• Do you believe your coverage of Hillary Clinton's candidacy was as critical as your coverage of Donald Trump's candidacy?
• Do your current efforts to aggressively cover the Trump administration match the approach you took in the early days of the Obama administration?
• Do your news operations have policies in place to analyze impartiality on news reporting?
Citing use of resources for such a prominent role in American discourse, Cramer believed he had every right to make certain that whatever news was going across the federal airwaves was not only fair, but objective.
Fast forward almost five months to the present. Cramer has yet to hear from any of the “big three” network executives.
Cramer is moving on, saying that the “no response” from media executives was answer enough: “I've had a response in that I haven't heard back from any of the network executives… I consider their arrogance or indifference to be a message, and I take it as much. No response is a response to me.”
This wasn’t his first attempt at getting the mainstream media to respond. Prior to the election, Cramer sought a congressional hearing on the issue, but many claimed he did so only for political gain, which he denied. In lieu of the congressional hearing, Cramer’s letter was sent as a kind of “I’ve got my eye on you” message, “so that these guys are on notice that they're not doing this within a vacuum.”
With so much of the mainstream media making headlines itself – thanks to President Trump and speaking out against “fake news” and “fake media” — it’s safe to say the media has been put on full blast, and that everyone is paying more attention to the obvious media bias that still exists, even more so today.
