Yesterday Dan Gainor posted an article at Fox News about journalism in 2019. Dan Gainor is the vice president for TechWatch, business and culture at the Media Research Center. You can follow him at @dangainor on Twitter.
The article lists seven reasons for calling 2019 American journalism’s worst year ever.
The article reports:
- President Trump’s impeachment wouldn’t have happened without an activist press leading the way. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said repeatedly she didn’t want to impeach Trump, knowing that the Republican-controlled Senate would never convict him and realizing the pointless exercise would hurt Democrats in the 2020 election.
2. The New York Times made news the wrong way when the paper ran a legitimate headline about Trump in August. The headline in the print edition of the newspaper was only five words: “TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM.” (Yep, he did.)
Left-wing critics chimed in almost immediately, outraged that the accurate headline didn’t bash the president sufficiently. Everyone from Democratic presidential candidates to radical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., skewered the paper.
Even its own staff. New York Magazine and HuffPost Contributor Yashar Ali tweeted that Times staffers “feel like their hard work is being sullied by a horrible headline.” They blamed it Executive Editor Dean Baquet.
Baquet caved first on the headline. The Times changed it in later editions to “ASSAILING HATE BUT NOT GUNS.”
3. Few incidents show the collapse of journalism ethics more than ABC’s attempt to hype Turkey’s attack on the Kurds in Syria. The goal appeared to be to embarrass President Trump – who had pulled U.S. troops from the Kurdish-controlled portion Syria – and possibly draw the U.S. into war.
ABC’s Tom Llamas told the “ABC World News Tonight” audience that Trump was “effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against ISIS.” ABC then broadcast a video that Llamas said appeared to show “Turkey’s military bombing Kurdish civilians in a Syrian border town.”
Only it wasn’t. It was from a nighttime machine gun shoot held by a Kentucky gun range. The president mocked the “FAKE footage.” ABC apologized. But it ran the apology on its website and viewers never knew how badly the network fed them false information.
4. The same media pros who freak out when anyone dares criticize teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg were quick to slam an entire high school. Journalists especially blamed student Nicholas Sandmann for a confrontation that happened in January.
…The journalistic witch hunt was based on a selectively edited video and the fact that Sandmann was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. The horrendous news coverage spawned multiple, well-deserved defamation lawsuits.
5. Journalists have elevated anyone who represents The Resistance against Trump. But no one got more star treatment than now-disgraced anti-Trump attorney Michael Avenatti, who represented adult film star Stormy Daniels in her case against Trump.
6. The Russia collusion narrative ran smack dab into reality this year. Journalists who spent at least 2,284 minutes on TV claiming the president was working with or for an American enemy failed to deliver any proof of their ridiculous claims.
7. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald summed up the media’s failure: “This was the single biggest story the US media fixated on for *3 years* & got the crux of it totally & completely wrong in a very damaging way.”
Unfortunately, journalists haven’t learned a darn thing. And that summarizes 2019 as well as anything.
I have no reason to believe that 2020 will be any different. I am waiting for all the polls that show President Trump losing to whoever the Democrats nominate by a landslide. Then after the election, the pollsters will try to get their credibility back. We have seen this play before.