Of course the news media is biased.
It always has been, and it always will be. To say otherwise is to deny the entire history of American journalism.
Widespread press animus toward Donald Trump -- before the election and after -- is undeniable. It is palpable. The media hates Trump, Republicans, conservatives and what they believe in. It is the defining theme of the contemporary American news business.
But it is also neither new nor surprising.
From the earliest days of this Republic, and through every era of its history, the news of the day has been driven by a political or financial agenda. The notion of "objective" reporting is a relatively modern idea born in the classroom and practiced by few. Any reading of American history shows that the press, though often influential, has always been propagandistic.
And usually it has been for sale.
The newly minted First Amendment protection of a free press was used to publish -- on behalf of those who supported Thomas Jefferson -- claims that George Washington was sleeping with everything on two legs. Similar publications -- supporting John Adams and the Washington coalition -- attacked Jefferson for being a drunk and raping a slave.
Alexander Hamilton -- before he was a musical -- coalesced power by building and buying a series of newspaper editors, assuring praise for himself and condemnation for his opponents. The rise of Andrew Jackson -- the founder of the Democratic Party -- came about because he got control of the newspapers. He used them in his fight against a national bank -- which in turn used its own newspapers to fight back. Likewise, the rise of the Republican Party -- in 1856 and 1860 -- was helped along by a string of newspapers which advocated for the party and its principles.
The run up to the Civil War was marked by shouting stories in Democrat and Republican newspapers, extolling the virtues of the one and condemning the vices of the other.
That, in large part, is why some newspapers today have "Democrat" or "Republican" in their names.
And the bias wasn't just political. For most of the 1800s, American newspaper editors were for sale, and businesses and regional interests wanting praise for themselves or defamation of their rivals merely had to come up with the money to buy it. Land speculators routinely bought stories praising whatever part of the country it was they were hoping to draw settlers to. If you invented something or wanted investors for your business, you paid the local newspaper to write a glowing story.
Newspapers were also routinely owned by the moneyed interests of a region and ended up being little more than cheerleading for those moneyed interests.
The Spanish American War was a gift from the Hearst and Pulitzer newspaper chains, which were looking for a juicy topic to spike circulation. The Gannett newspaper chain was built by a decidedly political man who was the Republican candidate for governor of New York and went on to seek his party's nomination for president. Horace Greeley was a man up to his eyeteeth in the Republican Party and who likewise sought the presidency.
Beyond the political and commercial, American journalism has also been resoundingly unreliable. If you read history, American newspapers are almost never relied upon as primary sources and their contents often deviate completely from documentable fact. That's because for more than 150 years they had a habit of making things up. Even as recently as the Lindbergh crossing, the major newspapers of New York and Chicago -- taken by surprise by the flight -- fabricated their coverage of it. One of the largest newspapers of that day -- and this -- made up an entire account of the flight which it published under Lindbergh's byline.
There is also the issue of infiltration. From the late 1920s on, progressives with philosophical ties to Russian communism were significant voices in American journalism. That priority -- advancing global socialism -- tinged coverage of the Great Depression and the build up to World War 2. When the Soviets were allied with the Nazis, the leftists in the American press opposed American support for Germany's victims. When the Nazis turned on the Russians, the American press likewise turned toward interventionism in the war.
After the war, when the occupation policies of George Patton pushed back against Soviet interests in Eastern Europe, a quartet of leftist American journalists went specifically to Germany to take Patton down. And it did.
The leftist lean of the American news media continues to this day. It is proven in surveys, political registrations and donations, and any fair reading of the reporting. Whether that arises from the institutional bias of a profession comprised of 98% college graduates reporting on a country of 25% college graduates, or whether journalism schools and hiring practices select for progressives and discriminate against conservatives, is open to debate. But the homogeneous and leftist nature of the American press can't be denied. In the news business, there is a diversity of faces, but not of opinions. Progressives of every demographic niche are welcomed, but only progressives are welcomed.
The news media is biased and propagandistic.
That's just the way it is.
But it's also the way it's always been.
So we shouldn't worry too much about it. Our nation has flourished with a biased press, and there's no reason to believe it won't continue to do so.
Because we've never taken it too seriously. Americans of every age have taken what the reporters say with a grain of salt.
As evidenced by the outcome of last November's election.
With all the power of the American press arrayed against him, Donald Trump still won.
That lets you know just how powerful the news media is -- or isn't.