The Democratic Party Confronts the Perils of a Biased Press

The lack of a critical press isn’t helping the Democratic Party: It is hurting it.

Former Vice President of the United States Joe Biden speaking with attendees at the Moving America Forward Forum hosted by United for Infrastructure at the Student Union at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada. February 16, 2020. (photo: Gage Skidmore)

The idea that most major media outlets lean slightly left was once a fringe conservative conspiracy theory popular only with certain segments of the tin-foil hat wearing population. And with libertarians.

Today, however, it is a well-known fact that most major news organizations in the U.S. lean left. Some do so openly so by their own admission, others tacitly. As such, members of the press were bound to be hard on any Republican president with whom, by virtue of fundamental differences in political opinions, they were bound to disagree.

The meeting of Donald Trump and the U.S. press was instead a perfect storm; a press biased against a Republican president, and a Republican president unlike any other. One who thrived on controversy, courted drama and wasn’t at all cowed by the Democratic Party’s success in the “Culture Wars”.

But the contentious relationship between the U.S. press and Donald Trump didn’t get its start during the 2016 presidential campaign; it actually started in 2008.

Unlike Donald Trump, President Barack Obama, the sender of shivers up journalistic legs, was the darling of the U.S. media at large. Obama was once asked by a breathless press corp such hard hitting questions as “What are your picks for March Madness?”.

Meanwhile, even the very Democrat-friendly Washington Post now admits the extents to which the Obama administration went to conceal military failures in Afghanistan from the American public.

While the press was looking elsewhere, the Obama administration deported more people than the Trump administration. While the press fawned over him, Obama continued the drone-bombing policies of the Bush years and expanded on those programs.

Such overwhelmingly positive coverage of the Obama administration for eight-years created an unguarded, naive press who never saw the upset of the 2016 election coming because their reporting had become too one-sided to be reliable.

The complete lack of media coverage of the economic shortcomings of the Obama administration created a huge blindspot, through which Donald Trump strolled…