It’s really not going well for the “progressive left.” After all those millions of dollars poured into ensuring that the movie Barbie earned money (thus avoiding the very public humiliation of Disney’s recent Little Mermaid which flopped spectacularly at the box office), the very feminist, very woke, very anti-masculinity crowd went into full meltdown just a few days ago after Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig failed to secure Oscar nominations for best actress and best director, respectively, only to see Ryan Gosling snag a nomination for best supporting actor.
Perhaps the only thing that could have enraged the Barbie crowd more, thus pushing the amusement factor to 11, is if Ryan Gosling had been nominated for best actress instead. Which in today’s so-called gender fluid, inclusive society is not as far out an idea as it sounds.
In any event, another interesting meltdown occurred just last week when Taylor Lorenz appeared in a viral video where she laments that the “entire journalism industry is basically in a free fall.” She then rattles of the mass layoffs at the LA Times (including its politics section, considering it’s a US election year), and emphasizes that the foregoing followed “months and months and months of layoffs in the media industry, in fact tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year.” Perhaps even more depressing (for her, anyway) is that “pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that… a lot of Millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.”
And she’s not wrong: publications like the New York Times to the Washington Post indeed laid off mass numbers of its employees. CNN Philippines itself just shut down its operations last week, following in the footsteps of BuzzFeed News which closed down last year.
And the list of news media being gutted goes on and on: Insider, Forbes, New York Daily News, Paramount, Condé Nast, and Sports Illustrated (see “Mainstream media bloodbath: News outlets slash jobs as business suffers,” Axios, January 2024).
And yet, while expressing sympathy with the thousands of ordinary employees that lost their employment and source of income, one feels little to lament about the closure of such news media itself. Because for an industry that owes its existence to the trust of its readers and viewers, most of news media decided instead to play the arrogance card and take advantage of that trust.
Rather than being merely the observer and then objective reporter of what’s happening on the field, today’s journalists got the bizarre idea (from who knows where) that they are as good or even better than the actual players and thus inserted themselves in the game. This despite the fact that no one actually wanted to see them on the field.
Hence, the prevalence of “media bias,” the “tendency of news media to report in a way that reinforces a viewpoint, worldview, preference, political ideology, corporate or financial interests, moral framework, or policy inclination, instead of reporting in an objective way (simply describing the facts). A media outlet may reveal bias in how it reports specific news stories or which stories they choose to cover, i.e., deem more important than others to cover or emphasize” (“What is media bias?,” All Sides, February 2022).
In short, most news media departed from being the mere objective reporter of news to becoming propagandists of their own personal (oftentimes aligned with corporate) political ideology — which is mostly of the woke, “progressive,” Left point of view.
Hence, the appallingly (and heavily selectively censored) coverage on the COVID-19 lockdowns, their grotesque push for mandatory vaccination (with their even more grotesque acquiescence to terminate the employment and education of those refusing vaccination), their fanatical push for climate change policies, their anti-Christian stance, and their maniacal advocacy for the LGBT and trans ideology.
And journalism’s arrogant bias — particularly in the area of politics — kept growing more and more brazen. Back in 2004, BusinessWeek reported: “On the liberal end, Newsweek had an astonishing rating of 72 — that’s 33 points more liberal than the House median.
Other highly liberal outlets included The New York Times, Time magazine, the CBS Evening News, USA Today, and NBC Nightly News. These scores ranged from 62 to 64, about 25 points above the House median.” (“The Liberal Media: It’s No Myth,” BusinessWeek, June 2004).
By near present day, the leftist bias of journalists is a given. Oftentimes it is disguised: “‘We observed a lot of subtle differences in the words they choose when they cover the same high-level topics,’ says Hanjia Lyu, a computer science PhD student who was the lead author of the study. ‘For example, when covering abortion issues, Reason tends to use the term ‘abortion law,’ while CNN underscores its ideological position by using the term ‘abortion rights.’ On a higher level they are both talking about abortion issues, but you can feel the subtle difference in the words that they choose’.” (“Study of headlines shows media bias is growing,” University of Rochester, July 2023).
However, for particular political or social issues, journalists just straight out let their bias show. Witness the several times Joe Biden fell while walking (sometimes even as much as three times at one stretch) during a public event: “As of Friday afternoon, the homepages of MSNBC, CBS News, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and New York Times had no mention of Biden’s stumbling incident earlier in the day at Joint Base Andrews. According to various organizations that monitor the media, CNN devoted 15 seconds to the incident and MSNBC about a minute.”
And yet when Donald Trump happened to simply walk slowly down a ramp after delivering a West Point graduation address in 2020, “CNN devoted 22 minutes and 13 seconds to Trump’s walk down the ramp, and MSNBC devoted 28 minutes and 42 seconds to the story.”
Basically, the supposed “objective,” “free and fair” news media treated Biden’s fall as “simply a slip, something we’ve all done at one time or another. But with Trump … it was treated as a sign of potential serious health questions” (“Media stumbles: Its bias shows in covering Biden v. Trump,” The Hill, March 2021).
Also don’t forget news media’s unapologetic reportage on Jussie Smollett and the copycat hate crime hoaxes, as well as the “mostly peaceful” riots of BLM.
And of course, there’s the classic, “we’re supposed to believe it’s unbiased” headline by Time magazine on President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.: “The World should be worried about a dictator’s son’s apparent win in the Philippines” (May 2022).
The point is, “despite journalists’ denials, it’s now pretty much a fact that journalism is one of the most left-wing of all professions. But until recently, that wasn’t thought to be true of financial journalists — who have a reputation for being the most right-leaning and free-market-oriented among mainstream journalists. If that was ever true, it sure isn’t today, a new study suggests,” said Investor’s Business Daily in a November 2018 editorial (“Media Bias: Pretty Much All Of Journalism Now Leans Left, Study Shows”).
“Researchers from Arizona State University and Texas A&M University questioned 462 financial journalists around the country. They followed up with 18 additional interviews. The journalists worked for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and a number of other newspapers,” it continued.
Unfortunately, the bias comes with a cost and the cost is paid by the ordinary citizen: “The profound leftward ideological bias of the Big Media is the main reason why America now seems saturated with ‘fake news,’” said the Investor’s Business Daily piece. One saw this most clearly during the COVID coverage, with news media masking their fanaticism behind supposed fact-checkers to stop any report or opinion going against the COVID pro-lockdown/mask/vaccination narrative.
However, if people cannot trust news media, then where should they get their information from? The answer: from various sources giving unfiltered information, clearly delineating opinion commentary from news reportage, for which the people are then free to weigh the information they received on their own and deciding what to believe for themselves.
As it should be. That’s the entire point of a free society, with free speech and a free press.Make no mistake, a free press is necessary to society and there are still news sources that remain trusted by the people. Some examples — the Daily Wire, a news organization co-led by Ben Shapiro, is experiencing an expansion. The Heritage Foundation also reported raising more money in 2023 than in previous years.
And certainly, a silver lining is that — what with the layoffs in many news media and the closure of CNN Philippines — Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is still very much around. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institutions to which he belongs.
The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institutions to which he belongs.
Jemy Gatdula read international law at the University of Cambridge. He is the dean of the Institute of Law of the University of Asia and the Pacific, and is a Philippine Judicial Academy lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.https://www.facebook.com/jigatdula/Twitter @jemygatdula