From a journalistic perspective, the mainstream media is actually an fascinating creature. They want to be taken seriously, but the nonsense they produce and feed to the American people is anything but. Now, in the midst of a presidential campaign, when seriousness and perhaps objectivity might be of paramount importance, they have been told it’s OK to not hold one of the candidates accountable and to report on them differently. Why? Well, to put it in basic schoolyard terms: “We find one candidate disgusting and we don’t find the other.”
NYT editorial staff member Mara Gay @MaraGay perverts the fundamentals of journalism, where a “newspaper” tells the public the events of the day
Mrs Gay shows us how much of a Marxist she is by openly saying that she (I cannot remember anyone elevating her to God) like and …
— Scott Hendricks (@ConservativeAd5) 6 September 2024
Luckily, some people watch “Morning Joe” on MSNBC so the rest of us don’t have to. On Thursday, Mara Gay, a member of the New York Times editorial board, appeared to offer some professional advice. Moderator Joe Scarborough lamented the Despite the time-honored separation between editorial and news in coverage of presidential candidates – as if that were the case on MSNBC, for example – he called it utterly “absurd” to believe that there is a moral equivalence between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Gay agreed, saying it was “a little silly” to hold both of them to the same standards. Gay added that the “choice is obvious,” implying that one standard is fine for Kamala Harris and another for Donald Trump. How professional. Gay then went on to give a prime example of exactly how one can blur the line between editorial and news, saying:
“I think the challenge, not just for journalists but for the entire country, is that Donald Trump is not only a threat, but he’s lowering the bar. So I don’t think that’s unacceptable. And I think it’s important to our role as journalists to really support any candidate for office.”
But Mara Gay was still at the very beginning of her career. She is also an experienced journalist.
“The context is difficult because of the extremism of the Republican Party, because of the extremism of Donald Trump, it’s difficult to hold both candidates equally accountable because one is committed to democracy and behaves like a normal candidate of a normal American party, the other is not. So it’s really about the extremism of the Republican Party. And it’s important to hold all candidates accountable. But when you do that, it sounds a little silly sometimes, because given the breadth of what the vice president has to offer the American people, Donald Trump is not comparable.”
There is no media bias in the way Kamala Harris is being treated versus the way President Trump is being treated. Not at all. pic.twitter.com/UwV3q6RYqh
— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) 31 August 2024
So let me see if I understand this correctly. Even though you say that all candidates must be held accountable and held to the same standards, it is journalistically acceptable to be biased because you believe your opinion is fact. Journalists like Mara Gay are Exactly Why trust in the media for Americans at an all-time low.
As you might expect, this is nothing recent. And we have Donald Trump to thank for introducing this recent “truthfulness” to the media. In 2016, New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote actually asked the question that journalists were fair and objective in covering Trump during his first campaign. “Trump is such a dangerous guy – how are we supposed to cover him?” Rutenberg concluded that if journalists believed Trump was such a danger, they would have to throw their objectivity out the window and reflect that view in their reporting. Doesn’t that contradict everything you learn in Journalism 101? Of course it does, but it’s Donald Trump, so different rules apply.
Rutenberg concluded that journalism “should not be judged by any one campaign’s definition of fairness.” However, the last time I checked, there were Is an actual definition of fairness. But that was the media’s permission to cover Trump the way they did, and people like Mara Gay who supported that.
Some of us are aged enough to remember when Walter Cronkite simply reported the news and did not distort it based on his beliefs. Nobody knew about it until he retreated to his yacht that he was a liberal. If journalists believe that fairness and objectivity are optional, we are headed for something bad.
Same policy.
The same socket.
Various candidates.
Other headlines.There was a gap of less than two months between these headlines.
This is what mainstream media bias looks like in REAL TIME. pic.twitter.com/PlvEmX0iqO
— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) 12 August 2024
