One of the twisted facets of liberal bias in news coverage is that it not only brings half truths and outright lies to viewers and readers, but it effectively kills stories because those stories could damage a progressive ally, liberal message, or Democrat candidate.
Such is the case with the falling apart of the case against General Michael Flynn. Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz comments, “Here is a telling thing in terms of the media coverage. The week before Attorney General William Barr made that decision, to move to drop the Justice Department’s case against Flynn, a whole bunch of documents were released…that appeared to show FBI agents considering setting a perjury trap for Mike Flynn… In primetime that night CNN did nothing. MSNBC did nothing. Fox, they had a whole lot. The problem with not covering a story like that at all is when the following week the case is dropped and then you have to cover it. You’re immediately playing catch-up.”
Kurtz identifies the symptoms, not the underlying disease, of liberal bias. As the case continues to move the media cycle, Kurtz said he is concentrating on “the degree to which partisan divides in the media affect the coverage of all this. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the president is, after all, in an election year, [and] that part of his strategy is not just to demonize the press, which he has been doing for three-plus years…but to do it in brutally personal terms.”
True: the president plays hardball. But when you undergo the vicious and brutal personal attacks he has gone through the last three years there is more than enough justification to hit back. Even when the president has tried to be gracious, the press has turned him away.
Kurtz: “The president feels it’s in his interest to fight multiple battles at once. But the counter to that is, we’re in this national emergency. Why not focus almost all of your attention on that?”
What Kurtz is missing here is that the press decides to a great extent how the American people see the virus crisis and the president himself. The media acts as a prism and most data is filtered through it. If the president, as other GOP presidents like the Bushes before him, just sat back and took the bias without fighting back, the political equation would benefit the Democrats because of the inherent media bias in their favor.
Can you imagine how the political environment would be if voters accepted the media’s coverage without presidential comment? One, Trump never would have been elected. Two, if he had been he would have been impeached then convicted in the Senate. Three, ignoring those factors, the current fight against the virus would be still in the initial stages, as the press and their Democrat allies lurch from one nanny state solution to the next.
What the president has recognized and fought back against is not just progressive bias, it is the lies told to the people by the media. As he does it, he brings clarity and an actual mainstream perspective to the stories of the day.
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