Jeffrey Lord
Jeffrey Lord is a Contributing Writer for NewsBusters. Lord is a former White House political director in the Reagan White House and aide to HUD Secretary Jack Kemp.
They couldn’t abide him.
And they made no secret of it.
The ‘they’ here is the so-called ‘mainstream’ media – AKA in reality the liberal media.
‘Him’, of course, is Donald Trump. That would now be President-elect Donald Trump. A president-elect who won his race in a landslide, winning both the Electoral College and, in a first for a GOP candidate since 2004, the national popular vote as well.
But how could this be, you ask? After all, everywhere Americans looked in this election the media was out there trashing Trump. From the New York Times to the Washington Post to the studios of MSNBC, CNN, the broadcast studios and more, the disdain for Trump was constant. It was not to be escaped. And if that anti-Trumpism was not displayed, then various outlets would call out their colleagues for doing their duty.
Over there at the Associated Press was this:
During a Wisconsin rally the last weekend of September, Trump talked of danger from criminals allowed in the country illegally. “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat,” he said. The New Republic writer Michael Tomasky was surprised not to find the quote in The New York Times’ and Washington Post’s coverage, although The Times noted that Trump vilified undocumented immigrants, and there were other media references to what Trump himself called a dark speech.
In other words, Tomasky was saying the Times and Post had fallen down on their lefty media obligations to trash Trump.
Back there in the stone age of December, 2023 – on the edge of the new 2024 election year – was this headline from NPR:
As 2024 approaches, the media is faced with the question of how to cover Donald Trump
NPR answered its own question by quoting the Atlantic’s Brian Klass as saying:
There is nobody in my field who thinks that Donald Trump is not a threat to democracy.
Ahhh yes. Trump as a “threat to democracy.”
This type of group liberal ‘media think’ was not a stand-alone by one Establishment media journalist.
In 2021 the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat headlined:
Can the Press Prevent a Trump Restoration?
Wrote Douthat (bold print for emphasis supplied):
There is a school of thought that holds that if Donald Trump sweeps back into power in 2024, or else loses narrowly but then plunges the United States into the kind of constitutional crisis he sought in 2020, the officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism. It will have failed to adequately emphasize Trump’s threat to American democracy, chosen a disastrous evenhandedness over moral clarity and covered President Biden (or perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris) like a normal politician instead of the republic’s last best hope.
Got that? If Trump were to win in 2024:
… the officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism. It will have failed to adequately emphasize Trump’s threat to American democracy…
For his part, Douthat argued: “I think this point of view is very wrong. Indeed, I think it’s this view of the press’s role that actually empowers demagogues, feeds polarization and makes crises in our system much more likely.”
In the Washington Post, lefty columnist Dana Milbank posited this all the way back in 2021:
We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.
… Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand.
There was more of this out there in the so-called ‘mainstream media.’ Oh so much more.
Over in his recent column, NewsBusters’ own Rich Noyes recently headlined this just before the election:
TV Hits Trump With 85% Negative News vs. 78% Positive Press for Harris
The result of all this anti-Trump coverage? An American voting public that had to face the real, everyday consequences of the left-wing Biden-Harris administration’s policies that, among other things, inflated the price of everything from a dozen eggs to a gallon of gas. And facing this reality as the mainstream American media trashed not Biden and Harris but Trump, day-in-and-day-out.
To say the least, Americans didn’t buy all the liberal anti-Trump media propaganda. In fact, it is safe to say many resented it. And, amusingly, trapped in a liberal bubble of their own making, the media didn’t get it – and so they kept pouring on their anti-Trump coverage. Ironically adding fuel to Trump’s campaign.
The result? To the astonishment of the lib media, in an election that recalled President Richard Nixon’s description of a “great silent majority”, Americans headed to the polls this last week and overwhelmingly voted for Trump. And not only Trump, but for a GOP held Senate and, as this is written, potentially a GOP House as well.
The real question for the ‘mainstream’ media now?
As America heads into the next four years of a Trump presidency, will the media get that if they spend the next four years piling on Trump for everything from his domestic and foreign policies to his haircut style or golf clothes – they will be continuing a war on… themselves and their own credibility.
In short, with no small amount of irony, what the mainstream liberal media has accomplished with its constant negative coverage of Trump is… re-electing him. In a landslide.
Will they learn from this backfire?
Don’t bet the ranch.
This article was originally published by MRC NewsBusters.
