BROADCAST BIAS: Media circle the wagons to protect their anti-Trump reporting
The liberal media includes a cadre of media reporters who see their jobs as waging war on any media owner or executive who might move their outlet ever so slightly toward the center. They’re very happy to find their allies inside newsrooms and grant them anonymity to trash anyone who doesn’t see their job as impeaching and jailing President Donald Trump and describing everyone who works for him as Gestapo equivalents.
CBS News under new owner David Ellison and his hand-picked Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss became a hot topic again this week when Weiss held an all-staff meeting to clear the air with all the anonymous sources who are trashing her behind her back. The Daily Beast headline captured their tilt: "MAGA-curious CBS boss dares defiant staffers to quit in tense all-hands." Their headlines on new evening news host Tony Dokoupil tag him as "MAGA-coded."
Critics of this new regime love to predict doom around the corner. The Ringer literally cartooned Weiss’s CBS as "pancaked, Wile E. Coyote–style, against the side of the mountain." Variety’s CBS sources described the network being on the verge of a "death spiral" that is "hard to reverse." CBS News has been in third place for decades, and their audience continues to decline, but only adding viewpoint diversity is "death spiral" material.
Weiss was blunt about the declining appeal of traditional media. "We are not producing a product enough people want," she said. She sounds a lot like other network chieftains in the realization that most younger Americans don’t watch TV news or listen to traditional radio. They’ll have to grab them in some other format. The "graying" of the audience is a hard fact.
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But the liberal hardliners can’t abide trying to find new audiences by including dissenting opinions, or "news judgment" that isn’t fervently anti-Trump. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik relied on eight anonymous CBS complainers. Some were outraged that the "CBS Evening News" brushed over the fifth anniversary of January 6 in less than a minute, but ended the program with a light, jokey segment about memes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Dokoupil offended the insiders by concluding, "Marco Rubio, we salute you."
The traditional CBS approach can be seen on their "Sunday Morning" program a year ago, on January 12, 2025, when CBS reporter Martha Teichner celebrated then-President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, under the headline "Man Of The World." Teichner, a classmate of Hillary Clinton’s at Wellesley, gushed over Blinken "photo bombing" a picture of female foreign ministers at a NATO meeting, and celebrated Blinken as a square. He "promoted music diplomacy — by performing the Muddy Waters blues standard ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ in a suit and tie." Saluting Democrats is the norm.
The bias-boosting media reporters are also upset at Washington Post CEO Will Lewis, who is expected to announce mass layoffs any day now, with expected cuts to sports and foreign coverage, which do not click profitably. Making a newspaper less broad-based may be the wrong strategy, but it’s fascinating to see journalists blame the owners and the "business side."
Former Post reporter Ashley Parker tweeted: "I don’t understand how laying off a bunch of talented and hardworking journalists solves what is fundamentally a publisher and business side problem. The Post deserves better." An anonymous Postie claimed: "The newsroom is being punished for absolute incompetence from the owner and publisher."
It’s better for journalists to stay anonymous when they accuse a self-made billionaire of incompetence. All this makes journalists look like an entitled class of brats. When people stop buying the newspaper and they lose $100 million a year, don’t blame "talented journalists," it’s a "business side problem."
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Glenn Kessler, the Post's former fact-checker, spoke for the reporters when he told Fox News Digital: "Many have dedicated their professional careers to the Post and are worried an important American institution is being dismantled." But would it be "dismantled" by layoffs, or by appearing more friendly to Trump?
The same internal panic is happening at "public broadcasting" networks in the aftermath of Trump and the Republicans canceling their taxpayer funding. PBS just canceled its "PBS News Weekend" show and created instead two weekend programs that don’t require any weekend staff.
NPR posted a long, screechy article by 19 correspondents about how Trump is engaged in "a sweeping expansion of executive power while eroding democratic norms." Under a propagandistic graphic of Trump pulling an electric plug out of the wall, NPR charged, "Trump has targeted freedom of speech, attempting to control and change information," including the defunding of public media.
These media activists equate their own attack journalism with "democratic norms," as if "democracy" is defined as trashing Republicans and helping Democrats win as many elections as possible. No one should challenge their ideological "control" of information, or they’re a troop of tyrants.