The Patriot Post® · CNN Eschews Balanced News Coverage
As the old adage goes, there are two sides to every story. Or as King Solomon once put it, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” This ideal serves as a foundational principle to fairness both under the law and generally across society at large. It’s a principle to be practiced whenever anyone hopes to suss out the truth. Thus, when someone advocates abandoning this principle, it should alert the hearer that what’s at play is a narrative designed to promote the acceptance of an agenda rather than genuine concern for illuminating the truth.
This truth-shading gambit was on full display again at CNN, where host Brian Stelter talked with Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes. Stelter, who often denies the reality that he is biased to the left, was intrigued by Calmes’s recent column in which she decried “both-siderism.”
In her column titled “Why journalists are failing the public with ‘both-siderism’ in political coverage,” Calmes lamented what she called “journalistic pressure” to produce stories with balanced political coverage that prevented the reporting of what she called “the new truth.”
Displaying the fact that she has not yet recovered from a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Calmes writes, “To the extent, then, that journalists and pundits focus critically on President Biden and Democrats and give short shrift to Republicans’ obstructions — as if the cancer of Trumpism was in remission, if not cured — that indeed distorts reality and disserves readers, listeners and viewers.” She later drops the all-too-common Democrat talking point that “democracy is literally at stake,” before she then blasts the Republican Party for not being “serious about governing or addressing the nation’s actual problems, as opposed to faux ones like critical race theory.”
The leftist political screed clearly inspired Stelter, who jumped on the false assertion that Republicans don’t “really care if government works well.” He then asked, “Is it that we’re treating Democrats and Republicans equally and ignoring GOP radicalism, is that the heart of the problem?” Wait, what GOP “radicalism”? What is it that the Republican Party currently supports that could even remotely be classified as radical? The answer: Anyone who doesn’t accept and adopt the increasingly extreme social policies promoted by the radical Left is decried by Democrats as “radical.”
Got that? Leftists are the aggressors in the culture and political wars, but conservatives are the “radicals” for … continuing to hold the same positions as before.
Furthermore, Stelter’s assertion that the mainstream media’s coverage of Democrats versus Republicans has been even remotely balanced, equal, or fair only serves to expose just how willfully blind he has become to the media’s long-running anti-conservative bias. The reason that Rush Limbaugh was so successful, that Fox News was created, and that our own little shop came into being way back in 1996 was to counter the hard-left tilt of the MSM.
Donald Trump’s presidency did not cause the MSM to go left. Rather, he only served to further unmask the reality that was already there. Recall the 2016 New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg in which he also called on journalists to dump “normal” journalistic standards because Trump was a “potentially dangerous candidate.” Obviously, in Rutenberg’s own mind his views were the truth standard, so why even give any consideration to the political views of half the country that disagreed with him?
Stelter may play a journalist on a propaganda station that acts the part of a straight “news organization,” but it’s obvious that he sees the purpose of news media to push the public into accepting a leftist worldview, not to honestly inform the public as to the events taking place in the world. Hence, he and a host of activist “journalists” are pushing a biased narrative that demonizes political opponents while elevating a partisan agenda as “the only sensible path forward.”