One of the take aways from Donald Trump visiting Wilmington has been an awakening to bias in mainstream media reporting. Are news outlets accurately portraying events, or skewing their reporting with bias or by censorship?
I was present when Trump made his Second Amendment remark. I understood it as meaning the Second Amendment people — synonymous with the National Rifle Association — could get things done. Lobbying the political establishment for 135 years, the NRA holds immense power.
But the media went wild, saying Trump just suggested people should go kill Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t so. Same with the funny Mr. Trump made: “Russia, if you’re listening, can you find those 33,000 emails?” I found it hilarious.
Trump claims the nation’s news outlets are biased against him with dissection or negative slant of his every remark. He speaks so harshly against the media — as a member, I went looking to see for myself.
If true, mainstream media discredit themselves and take the rest of us with them.
To determine whether the national media is biased in its reporting, take any news incident/event and see how it is covered. For example, watch Trump’s full fighting terrorism speech from Aug. 15 in Youngstown, Ohio. Then look at how the story was reported in the big print, broadcast and digital outlets: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. Compare the coverage.
In my experiment I watched the entire Republican convention, every speech from opening day to the balloon drop. Next, much of the Democratic convention. By then I had my answer.
Can candidate Trump, the billionaire real estate developer and highly successful businessman, get an accurate story that does not trash him, or a headline that isn’t skewed? I do not believe so.
The American mainstream media is biased, very much so. It is a pervasive norm and it makes me want to quit the media.
I chucked my party affiliation in disgust during the last big election cycle. I was done. I happily changed my party affiliation to NONE.
Leaders in both parties are all about themselves, totally self-centered, out to grab power and wealth and the Constitution be damned, tax and then crush the little guy with regulations. Forget about justice for all; pay for play is rampant.
Free and unfettered journalism is vital in America. A representative democracy depends on an unbiased Fourth Estate, we the media. Without truth, citizens are no longer informed and the government no longer accountable.
History has numerous examples of leaders experiencing positive bias. The media’s hands-off treatment of John F. Kennedy’s years of sexual exploits in the White House is but one example.
Richard M. Nixon was re-elected after the Watergate story broke. Where was the media? Barack H. Obama was the darling of the media from the time he first got the nod for the nomination. Mrs. Clinton enjoys unprecedented favor.
I ask myself, would Lumina News report more favorably or negatively on what the mayors of Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach do or say depending on their political party? God forbid.
DNC emails released by WikiLeaks revealed that the party could call up media and kill a story. It is sickening. The world just watched the outing of one American political party’s leadership working against one of its own candidates. Why isn’t the media all over this?
Or the mostly ignored report that Google has changed algorithms to alter the results of negative searches about Mrs. Clinton, that digital search results can be manipulated to bring one party up in a positive light and paint the other in a negative light. That tech companies Apple, Twitter, Google and Instagram are colluding to defeat Mr. Trump. If true, it is outrageous.
I have dropped my NYT and Washington Post digital subscriptions. I don’t want to read biased media coverage. I want to make up my own mind with facts. And I don’t know where to find them.
There may be a print or radio or broadcast outlet that is not biased, but as a whole, media reporting in America is messed up and needs a correction, an overhaul, a sharp and swift one.
It is time for each and every journalist in these United States to self- inspect and root out every bit of bias.
It is time for the Fourth Estate to clean house, speak out, holding itself and the government accountable to the people again.
