RUTHFULLY YOURS

The media’s leftward bias has been obvious for decades even as “journalists” denied their alignment with the Democratic Party. No honest person took Chris Cillizza’s 2016 claim that “reporters don’t root for a side. Period” to be true. All we’ve ever asked for is an admission from the media that it worked for the Democrats. We’re a little closer to that today.

Tuesday’s headline in the Daily Caller brought the light: “Major News Outlets Say They’re Ditching Objectivity In The Name Of ‘Diversity.’” The story beneath the headline tells us that, after interviewing more than 75 ​​”media leaders to gauge how the industry views the concept of ‘objectivity,’” a couple of big names in the press offered some guidelines for their colleagues.

The pair argued, said the Daily Caller, “that journalists should include their own beliefs, biases, and experiences to convey truth, and that journalistic objectivity was either unrealistic or undesirable.”

The two men who made the recommendation? Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

Not a year ago, the nabobs of the mainstream media tacitly admitted that their coverage is slanted when Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, announced it was “scaling back its opinion pages in an effort to combat a perception of” playing favorites and following a political agenda. The company claimed it had decided “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think.”

Of course the Gannett bosses didn’t say what they meant or mean what they said. As we wrote at that time, the press doesn’t need opinion pages when the “news” is so pointedly skewed that it is telling readers what to think.

The media’s constant protests of impartiality look more pathetic day by day – their pretense has been slipping for some time and they have often loudly undermined their shaky position. Think about the official unofficial policy at a number of media outlets regarding climate reporting and discussions. Their stated in-house rule is to ignore and “other” man-made global warming skeptics.

This was most evident three years ago when NBC’s “Meet The Press” moderator Chuck Todd said “we’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”

Funny how that policy is at the same time unscientific, and a clear gift to the Democratic Party and its extreme elements (which covers just about everyone associated with that party).

All the denials built up over the decades that the media aren’t happy publicists for the Democrats can be punctured with one fact: Research by George Mason University economics professor Tim Groseclose found that media bias is worth 8 to 10 percentage points to the Democratic candidates in a typical election.

The last time we noted that fact, we also pointed out that it “means the last time a Democrat won a presidential election without the media’s help was maybe 1996, when Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 8.5 percentage points – before that, it was Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 win over Barry Goldwater by more than 20 points.”

The study, which Groseclose, then at UCLA, co-authored with Jeff Milyo, now at the University of Missouri, was completed two decades ago, when media bias was real but not as spectacular as it is today. We’d imagine that automatic 8- to 10-point head start today is closer to 12 to 14 points.

The media are so obviously operatives of the Democratic Party that it only stands to reason that the election benefit has since grown. Just look at the 2020 presidential outcome, which punished the country with a Joe Biden win. That victory was made not possible but probable by more than four years of the press lying about Donald Trump’s connection with the Russians. Yes, the media might be unhinged from reality, but they are tightly hinged to the Democratic Party.