When New York Post writer Michael Goodwin devoted the first half of his Aug. 21 column to media bias, his gloves came off and he pulled no punches.
He accused his colleagues at the New York Times and Washington Post of having “jettisoned all pretense of fair play” in their coverage of presidential politics, taking a decided tilt against Republican Donald Trump. He didn’t stop there, telling readers that what is happening “before our eyes” is “the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.”s
“Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent,” Goodwin wrote in an essay that covered a lot of bases.
Goodwin’s rip against press bias focused largely on the New York Times. He said the newspaper is “so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.”
The veteran journalist acknowledged, “Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones…I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.”
That covers at least four decades, so Goodwin has had considerable time and experience to sort this out and arrive at his conclusions.
Goodwin also quoted another scribe, New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg, who also appears to have a negative opinion about today’s left-leaning journalists.
“Covering Mr. Trump as an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate is more than just a shock to the journalistic system,” Rutenberg wrote. “It threatens to throw the advantage to his news conference-averse opponent, Hillary Clinton, who should draw plenty more tough-minded coverage herself.”
Rutenberg leveled some harsh criticism toward Clinton’s appearance opposite Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” In that interview, Democrat Clinton asserted that FBI Director James Comey had essentially cleared her of wrong doing in the e-mail scandal. Rutenberg said Clinton’s assertions amounted to “a grossly misleading interpretation of an F.B.I. report that pointed up various falsehoods in her public explanation.”
“And, most broadly,” Rutenberg observed, “it upsets balance, that idealistic form of journalism with a capital ‘J’ we’ve been trained to always strive for.
“But let’s face it,” he said, “Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy.”
Goodwin perhaps wrote the epitaph of American journalism: “By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.”
