The problem is that dumping “old-style neutrality” hasn’t made news coverage more accurate, it’s just led the news media even further into the swamp of hysterical partisanship.
It’s left them prone to hoaxes and forced them to issue countless retractions and corrections. Any story that makes Republicans look bad gets paraded around before lifting a fact-checking finger — from Russia collusion to Jussie Smollet to the supposedly racist Catholic schoolboys.
Immediately after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the press jumped to the conclusion that his attacker was some sort of MAGA nutjob. He’s hardly that.
Just as bad, the non-neutral, truth-seeking press does its level best to keep the public in the dark about any scandals (Hunter Biden, anyone?) and crises that make Democrats look bad — a challenge that gets harder by the day.
Truth, it turns out, now matters far less to the “truth-seeking” press than ever.
Consider the recent string of events involving President Biden.
In the span of a few days, he called Kamala Harris a “great president,” got disoriented at an event on the White House lawn, claimed that his student loan giveaway was a law passed by Congress not his own executive order, misstated the name of Britain’s new prime minister, suffered another embarrassing teleprompter failure, appeared to nearly drift off into sleep during a TV interview, got confused about how to exit a stage he’d climbed up just moments before.
A neutral press would be demanding answers from the White House about Biden’s condition. They’d be talking to experts about the grave risks of having a president suffering from dementia in charge. They’d have their pollsters ask the public about its concerns with Biden’s mental health. (Something our Issues & Insights/TIPP has done).
Instead, reporters are feverishly sweeping Biden’s rapid deterioration under the rug. Indeed, if it weren’t for conservative news outlets, the public would have virtually no idea of how disturbing Biden’s decline has become.
They did the same thing with John Fetterman, the Democrat running for a senate seat in Pennsylvania. Reporters covering Fetterman haven’t been truth-seeking. They’ve been truth-denying about the debilitating effects of the stroke he suffered in May.