The Press Who Cried, "Wolf."

When the public's faith in you is less than their faith in Congress, you're screwed.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

―Garry Kasparov

According to a recent Gallup Poll, Americans’ trust in both the media and Congress is now at an all-time low. The noteworthy development in this decades-long trend is that Americans now trust the media even less than Congress, which is a first since polling on the subject began.

To me, this is completely unsurprising. Most of the mainstream media in this country has, for years, functioned as proxies for the Left. One could not have a difference of opinion, qualified or otherwise, with the take on issues promulgated by the mainstream American media without being tagged as racist, sexist, xenophobic, transphobic, a conspiracy theorist, anti-science, or some other moral malady, and a purveyor of disinformation. See COVID, Hunter Biden laptop, immigration, crime, or many other feature stories for details.

Then along came Joe Biden, an octogenarian president whose obvious and painful cognitive decline was plainly visible for all to see. The media’s take? Don’t believe your lying eyes. I think that just might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

As a long-time columnist and occasional feature writer, I have observed firsthand the overwhelming bias that exists in newsrooms. The vast majority of journalists are young, liberal, and smitten with the idea of moral crusades. Objectivity, or the idea that there could even be another legitimate take on an issue, has been considered non de rigueur for some time. The only thing that’s different these days is that it’s out in the open. Advocacy journalism is now the norm. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, said the quiet part out loud: “Objectivity has got to go.”

That’s the current mission in journalism: annihilate truth and replace it with progressive propaganda. The Biden fiasco made this obvious for all to see. That’s why less than a third of the American public trusts the media. They can plainly see the bias.

Oh the pain! I really suck at choosing professions that are in good alignment with my psyche, my other major profession being academia. That worked out well for me too.

The tell about the left and their sycophants in the media and academia that’s most indicative of their flaws in their certitude is a complete lack of self-awareness. These folks operate from inside a bubble that is as impervious to outside forces as a neutron star. Because everyone in the newsroom or faculty lounge agrees with them, they must be right. These self-styled gatekeepers have spent years talking down to the ruffians out in the intellectual sticks without a lot of direct pushback. That’s how they missed the fact that most of America (and a lot of their audience) is far to the right of their views on immigration, crime, the economy, taxes, public schools, issues of race, and transgenderism.

Don’t ask, and ignore the tell.

I’ve long maintained that the best way to ascertain the quality of almost any product is by how highly it is valued. When no one wants what you are selling, you can either blame the buyer, which is quite counterproductive, or figure out what’s wrong with your product. For decades, the media has engaged in much of the former and very little of the latter. There do seem, however, to be some nascent seeds of reckoning.

Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis recently reamed his newsroom over this very subject. "We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around," Lewis told the paper. "We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore."

Few things focus the mind like losing lots of money and perhaps your job. And given the fact that the national media is in trouble almost across the board, you’d think that this message would be a relatively easy sell. You’d be wrong if you did.

The Washington Post recently decided not to endorse any candidate in the upcoming presidential election. This isn’t a new policy; it’s a return to a policy in place before 1976. And given the fact that WaPo is losing readers in droves, it makes sense. From WaPo’s own recent editorial on the subject.

As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:

“The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952 election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation’s Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.”

The Editorial Board made two other points — ahead of an election that John F. Kennedy won — that will resonate with readers today:

“The election of 1960 is certainly as important as any held in this century. This newspaper is in no sense noncommittal about the challenges that face the country. As our readers will be aware, we have attempted to make clear in editorials our conviction that most of the time one of the two candidates has shown a deeper understanding of the issues and a larger capacity for leadership.”

However, it concluded:

“We nevertheless adhere to our tradition of non-endorsement in this presidential election. We have said and will continue to say, as reasonably and candidly as we know how, what we believe about the emerging issues of the campaign. We have sought to arrive at our opinions as fairly as possible, with the guidance of our own principles of independence but free of commitment to any party or candidate.”

And again in 1972, the Editorial Board posed and then answered this critical question ahead of an election which President Richard M. Nixon won: “In talking about the choice of a President of the United States, what is a newspaper’s proper role? … Our own answer is that we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no reason to depart from that tradition this year.”

That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.

We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.

Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.

Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent.

And that is what we are and will be.

Now one would think that the part in this editorial about trusting readers to be smart enough to make up their own minds would be at least somewhat persuasive. Not so, according to the reaction from the WaPo staff, who evidently believe, from the wailing and gnashing of teeth, that their readers are, in fact, not smart enough to make decisions about who to vote for without a lot of handholding.

And the knives are out. According to gleeful reports from Post staffers themselves, the paper lost a quarter of a million subscribers over this. Talk about celebrating your own demise. But who knows if that’s right? And if it is, I suspect that they’ll gain many more new subscribers in the fullness of time, reversing an already existing, decades-long trend of declining readership, once they prove that they are adept at reporting events dispassionately.

I, for one, applaud the Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others in journalism who stick to calling balls and strikes and allow readers to decide for themselves (at least outside of the op-ed section) what to think. I’d be delighted if many others followed suit and this became a trend.

But I won’t hold my breath.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.