Back in May, President Trump told Fox News he’s “greeted with a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen....Ninety-four or ninety-five percent of the press is hostile.”
Fact check: True. While every President has their critics in the press, the Trump presidency has been unique in that a massive percentage of the media — hosts, columnists, commentators, contributors, anchors and working reporters — openly mock and disparage the President of the United States, often to the cheers of their brethren.
By any historical measure, the coverage has been beyond all bounds of professionalism: The President is “an abomination,” a “sociopath,” “unfit to be human,” a “poor excuse for a man.” He’s a “racist” leading a “white nationalist, white supremacist presidency.” He’s “mentally ill,” and “can’t feel normal human emotions.” He’s an “outlaw,” a “criminal,” a “mob boss,” as well as a treasonous “Russian operative.” There are “rivers of blood on his hands.” He’s an “authoritarian” or a monarch; America is “teetering on dictatorship.” He’s the “worst President in American history.”
And that’s just scratching the surface. Watch:
The relentless warfare has probably hurt the President’s approval ratings, but it’s destroyed the media as a credible, non-partisan institution. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 10 percent of rank-and-file Republicans say they trust the media, vs. 73% of Democrats, a level of polarization that is “the most divergent in Gallup’s history,” according to the polling group.
Yet the media don’t seem to be able to see it. NBC host/political director Chuck Todd has claimed “one thing we’re not is the opposition,” a sentiment echoed by CNN’s obstreperous White House reporter, Jim Acosta: “We’re not the opposition party.”
CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter in August seemed totally unaware of his own network’s seething on-air contempt for the President, as he complained about Fox News’s criticism of Joe Biden: “Is there an equivalent to that on the left, tearing down Trump?”
The public sees it clearly: The liberal media have spent the last four years trying to shred the President, and in the process they’ve destroyed themselves. Whether Trump wins or loses on November 3, who will take them seriously again?
