I generally attend the weekly Lycoming County Commissioners Meeting and sit in the back with my other local press colleagues. I truly appreciate how objectively honest these journalists are. Their columns are straight up and accurate. It seems like a lifetime ago when newspapers simply told what happened, and the editorial page would be the place for opinions of what it all meant. Today, it seems that everyone wants to be a critic.
This is why those in the national press are quite depressed these days. One example of such appeared in the Washington Post on December 24th with the title, “Journalists must not be intimidated by Trump’s attacks on news media,” with the subtitle, “Fight the president-elect’s attack on independent journalism with a pro-truth stance.”
The irony of this is very much like the snake accusing the eel of being slippery. This headline came from Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist for the past three decades. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “his eloquent columns” related to his coverage of President Barack Obama. Robinson is a poster child for the struggle that journalism faces today. They have gone from writing the news to attempting to make the news. In fact, they have to “fight” against those that they do not agree with them. The problem for these great servants of the press is that the public is no longer picking up what they are putting down.
Take CNN, for example, the first multinational 24-hour cable news channel. Founded in 1980, the company, at its peak, had 42 bureaus, more than 900 affiliated local stations, and several regional and foreign-language networks worldwide. They claimed to be “the most trusted name in news.”
They also created a CNN Airport Network in 1991, which greatly helped their ratings, but died in 2021 when the passenger’s portable devices finally made the airport televisions obsolete. Their whole network may also become obsolete. In the 2020 election year, CNN had an average of 1.8 million viewers in prime time. By the end of 2024, their prime-time averaged less than 300,000 viewers, an 83.3 percent loss.
CNN and the other legacy media have been hemorrhaging customers drastically for some time now, and they have no one to complain to except themselves. The American people got tired of being told how beautiful the Emperor’s new clothes were when there was nothing there to see. When voters saw the real deal, such as Biden’s struggle through the June 27th debate with Trump, they wondered where this “sharp as a tack” man that they were continually being told about was.
As the all-great and powerful media continually ignored the defective American president, they continually mocked, humiliated, and lied about Donald Trump. However, as the American people began to actually hear Trump himself, the jig was up. Four years in a row, PolitiFacts has given its “Lie of the Year” to Donald Trump, and the past 14 out of the 15 years have also been Republicans. Could it be because 95 percent of journalists identify themselves as Democrats?
Americans are fed up with one-eye journalism. A recent Gallup poll showed that only 31 percent of Americans trusted the mainstream media to some degree. As a result, they sought alternatives such as X, Facebook, TikTok, podcasts, and other independent journalist sources, which were becoming the new reliable sources of important national and even international news information.
Ever since the Washington Post pulled down President Nixon as a result of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, the power to not just report news but make history themselves is like an aphrodisiac for the journalist ego. As Eugene Robinson warned, “Anyone who doubts the incoming Trump administration poses a serious threat to independent journalism has not been paying attention. An attack is already underway — and we journalists must not allow ourselves to be intimidated.”
Robinson believes that Donald Trump wants a tame and compliant media, and thus, his fellow journalists should fight against this. Yet, they would not have to fight at all if the press could simply rediscover basic journalism.
In 2024, the American people demonstrated that they are tired of Orange Man Bad commentary created by false and inaccurate information. They are tired of fabricated stories and quotes that are twisted or taken out of context. They are tired of omitting important information that makes a story misleading or inaccurate. They are tired of sensationalizing stories just to attract attention.
Instead of bias, the public would rather have both sides of an issue presented objectively.
It was the American people who fought back from the press at the polls in November. This is your wake-up call, media messengers. Just inform us; don’t try to transform us. All you are doing is chasing your own shadow on a cloudy day.
