In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned America about the “unwarranted influence” of a “military-industrial complex.” Were he speaking today, Ike might be warning about a media-political complex. And for the same reason, the dangers to democracy and liberty of “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
The 2016 presidential race will mark the low-water mark of journalism that is worthy of the First Amendment. Never before have so many media organizations, old and new, abandoned all pretense of fairness to take sides and try to pick a president. Their cozy confederacy with the incumbent political faction is largely in opposition to public will. Although polls show a tight race for the White House, studies find staggeringly lopsided coverage, with Donald Trump getting far more negative coverage than Hillary Clinton.
A survey covering 12 weeks of the campaign after the summer conventions found that 91 percent of Trump coverage on the three largest broadcast networks was “hostile.” The Media Research Center also found that much of the focus was on Trump’s personal life, while the networks downplayed investigations into Clinton’s emails and her family foundation. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have irrefutable evidence that none of this is based on journalism standards. Rather, it reflects the incestuous relationship between liberal members of elite media organizations and the Democratic Party. The alliance mocks any claims that the media are independent. From almost the beginning of this nation, the press was considered the party of the people, but in a few short years, escalated by the Clinton crime family it has reached a level that it cannot return from. Many of us do not see it ever returning to what it once was to be. What do you think?