Thank Donald Trump For The Media’s Liberal Bias

Conservatives were right: the mainstream media does have a liberal bias. And it only took Republicans five presidential elections of increasingly irrational and obsessively paranoid echo chamber politics to prove it.

Trump supporters have been calling out the media for focusing on Donald Trump’s scandals and controversies while ignoring Hillary Clinton’s scandals, and the Alt-Right has taken to calling CNN—somewhat truthfully—“Clinton News Network.” No doubt Clinton’s scandals get less scrutiny in the mainstream media… though because most of Clinton’s scandals are made-up, like the current vogue conspiracy in the Alt-Right alleging that Hillary Clinton is too physically fragile to walk up stairs or even stand on her own. And this comes after a full eight years of suggesting that President Obama is secretly—but not too secret for clever conservative sleuths—a Muslim terrorist.

The Republican presidential nominee himself, along with the politically-motivated conservative base that made up the Tea Party, spent several years insisting that Obama was never born in America, even after Obama showed his birth certificate. Sane voices and credible facts cannot breathe the conservative, echo chamber air when it is filled so much hubristic ignorance.

In response to the illegitimate outrage, the professionally skeptical mainstream media has acted ethically in ignoring some of conservatives’ most outrageous claims [Obama might be the Lizard-King with shapeshifting powers, it just isn’t very likely that the conservative fringe will be able to prove it according to standards of journalistic integrity].

The effect is that the MSM has a liberal slant because conservatives have spent the last two decades debasing their hyper-partisan ideology from facts, rationality, and civility. A recurring Trump stump speech line is that President Obama and Hillary Clinton jointly founded ISIS. He knows it is neither true nor ineffective, and the media knows it, too, which is why the media reacts negatively to Trump’s bullshit artistry. Trump’s staggering candidacy would make a lot more sense if he suddenly announced his campaign was a project of surrealist performance art exploring the dark side of democracy.

The reality is that Donald Trump’s campaign lies about virtually everything to the point that his spokespeople routinely leave interviewers speechless or in fits of laughter from their acrobatics of justification. Trump attacks virtually everyone, and the New York Times catalogues his many insults, though its immense list of 258 Trump enemies is only culled from Trump’s Twitter account.

Yet the most amazing part is that Donald Trump is as unqualified for the job as he is uninterested in doing the actual work the job requires. He wants to give most of the work to his vice-president! The mainstream media realizes that Trump would make an epically bad president, and there is no way to journalistically hide the reality that most of what Donald Trump says is egotistically frightening, factually untrue, and/or democratically offensive.

Say what you will about the editorial value of the Huffington Post’s insistence on including “Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.” at the bottom of every article regarding Trump, but you can’t say any of it is factually untrue.

The media’s treatment of Trump is consequently not just biased, it is journalistically responsible. The media is playing a valuable role in fighting back against Trump’s demagoguery because his nativist xenophobia is societally destructive. Meanwhile, Trump — like every fascist wannabe — has already promised to scale back the First Amendment’s protections of free speech. Trump is making negative coverage personally advantageous for media figures who depend on the First Amendment to work, express themselves, and contribute to their country. Who are you going to believe, the journalists who can easily and concisely fact-check Trump on-air in real time with little effort beyond knowing facts, or the insecure man who already has been involved in 3500 legal actions?

Either way, get the Trump bashing in now just in case Trump somehow manages to get elected and uses the full power of the US justice system against his critics.