Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
If we lived in a fair and just world, most of the current media would simply go away and try something else.
The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well.
We also expect officials to leak one-sided stories and then the media to print them without edits. These are all things baked into the media cake and the public understands, even if it does not quite accept them.
The crisis instead is that they are now almost always wrong, and predictably wrong because they are lazy and biased—and they deny it to the point of self-delusion. The result is that, for all practical purposes, journalists no longer exist for the general public as sources of news.
More than half the country now assumes that the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, the networks, and the cable news outlets are culpable not of merely failing to tell the truth but of being incapable of telling the truth. Even if they wished to, or had the skills to report empirically and dispassionately, they simply cannot, given their investments in the progressive agenda, and its investments in them. In other words, they are owned—creatures of that agenda.
Nowhere has the media nadir been clearer than in the case of ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.