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The Maine Sunday Telegram reported there will be a panel discussion Friday, November 17th at USM in Portland on media bias and the question: “Is the Press Being Fair to President Trump?” On that I agree with former President Jimmy Carter, who said two weeks ago: “I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president, certainly, that I've known about. I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”
The big name brought in for the panel is The Boston Globe’s Walter Robinson, head of the Globe Spotlight Team which won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the homosexual priest scandal in the Catholic Church. Robinson would likely chafe at my characterization because his team was careful to label it a pedophile priest scandal and play down the overwhelmingly obvious homosexual dynamic. Nonetheless, I applaud the Spotlight Team for their work. It nearly caused me to abandon Catholicism -- the religion of my youth to which I had returned only a dozen years before the scandal broke in 2002.
When Maine Sunday Telegram reporter Ray Routhier asked Robinson why it’s important to look at Trump’s treatment in media, Robinson said: “…because nearly half of the American people believe that the so-called ‘mainstream media’ are making stories up about him.” That’s an accurate assessment borne out by opinion polls, but then Robinson said: “When…the president…spends all of his time saying that reporters are enemies of the American people and they make everything up all the time, that’s bound to have some effect…even if it’s not true, which it isn’t.”
“All his time”? “Make everything up”? “All the time”? Talk about hyperbole. Yes, Trump has tweeted and said: “Fake news,” and has characterized some media as “enemies of the people” on occasion, but not all media. Rather, he singled out obviously biased media like NBC, ABC, NYTimes, CBS, and CNN. If he had more than 140 characters, he would no doubt have included The Boston Globe and the Maine Sunday Telegram as well. Let’s compare two stories currently in the news for just one example of liberal media bias:
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| Menendez and Moore |
Conservative Judge Roy Moore recently won the Alabama Republican senatorial primary in his bid to replace Jeff Sessions who became US Attorney General. Moore defeated what some call the “establishment” Republican, Luther Strange. Weeks later, the Washington Post published allegations that Moore had initiated a sexual encounter wit a 14-year-old girl in 1979. Ever since, those mainstream media outlets cited by Trump have given enormous attention to the story which Moore vehemently denies.
Liberal Democrat New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez has been on trial for corruption for over two months and his jury deliberates at this writing. According to politico.com: “…a grand jury indictment accuses Menendez of carrying out numerous political favors for [Salomon] Melgen, a close friend. Melgen gave more than $750,000 in campaign contributions, flights on his private jet, and hosted the senator at his private villa in the Dominican Republic’s Casa de Campo resort…” However according to The Daily Caller, Menendez and his friend are also alleged to have had sexual encounters with underage girls at that villa — and the FBI has written testimony from at least one of them.
How has mainstream media handled these two stories? Though Moore has not been formally charged, MSM has given extensive coverage to the allegations against him while completely ignoring the two-month trial of the sitting Senator Menendez. According to the Media Research Center: “In the past 24 hours [as of 11-10-17], the same networks that couldn’t find a single second to mention Menendez in 65 days, spent 24 minutes and 36 seconds on serious allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.”
That extremely biased coverage corresponds to how mainstream media has covered flimsy allegations of election collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign/administration. The only actual evidence after more than a year of intensive investigation is circumstantial at best, but mainstream media has given more attention to it than anything else in all of 2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued indictments against former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and his assistant, but not for collusion. The indictments had nothing to do with Trump. They were for money laundering and other things long before his association with Trump. There is, however, relatively hard evidence against the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee of election collusion with Russia which has been virtually ignored.
UPDATE: As of Tuesday morning, four more women have accused Moore of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers. Also, the Menendez jury may be deadlocked. The judge sent them home for a rest Monday.
