Make the News Great Again
Legacy media is caught in a death spiral of plummeting credibility and viewership.
But the cure is ridiculously simple.
Just get back to the basics: report the facts, tell the truth, and be fair.
Simple but difficult, because the hard part is overcoming denial.
And the first step to recovery is recognizing you have a problem.
Legacy media members would insist they already report the facts and tell the truth.
That is demonstrably not true.
And we can prove it.
Instead of reporting the most important facts in the last election season, or doing any real investigative work, big media did little more than parrot false Democrat talking points on the biggest issues:
• Lie: Inflation is not bad.
• Fact: Treasury Secretary Yellen admitted she was mistaken when she said inflation was transitory. Biden’s horrible economy proved to be the top issue in the 2024 election.
• Lie: The border is secure.
• Fact: A record 10 million illegal immigrants crossed the border under Biden.
• Lie: Crime is down.
• Fact: Violent crime shot up under Biden (but big media did not report how the FBI excluded major cities from its statistics until called out by independent media and Republicans.)
• Lie: Biden is alert and well.
• Fact: Biden couldn’t make it through one debate without imploding his candidacy due to his obviously diminished mental capacity.
• Lie: Trump voters are racists and sexists.
• Fact: Minority and women voters were key to Trump’s victory.
• Lie: Trump is Hitler.
• Fact: Most voters tuned out the rabid hate which was so over the top it boomeranged on Democrats.
There is no denying the media regurgitated these lies, over and over.
And there is no denying, none of that was true.
Just ask most voters, who ignored the media’s cheerleading for Kamala Harris.
Big media had been dying for years but the lies told in the Biden years were the final nails in the coffin.
Media credibility is dead.
On The Record reported how trust in news had already hit a historic low more than a year ago. A Gallup survey found only 16 percent of Americans trusted newspapers. Only 11 percent trusted television news.
Just imagine where it is now.
After all the lies listed above.
Subzero?
You might think President-elect Trump would be doing a victory dance on the grave of the fake-news-industrial complex. Just the opposite.
He wants a fresh start and is offering to help Make the Media Great Again, if you will.
"In order to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press," Trump said.
“I am not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly, or even badly beyond comprehension," he added.
But it is one last chance at redemption and resuscitation: "If not treated fairly, however, that will end."
To cure the problem, let us first define it.
The media has abandoned its mission.
When the media abandoned the pursuit of truth and objectivity it could no longer fulfil its purpose in a democracy: informing the public with accurate, factual information.
As with so many modern disorders, the problem began in academia. Postmodernist philosophy proclaimed all truth is relative. All truth became subjective – a matter of opinion. There was no longer any objective truth in the Ivory Tower.
It didn’t take journalism professors long to pick up on the grift.
Stanford journalism professor Ted Glasser explained how journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.”
Reporters were only too glad to kill that pesky objectivity in favor of pushing a leftist agenda of “social justice.”
Truth was dead, too.
NPR chief Katherine Maher explained during her infamous TED talk how, “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done,” because “we all have different truths.”
If all truth became subjective you could print whatever you want and claim it was true.
Because it was your truth.
Neat trick, but how to pull it off?
The New York Times had the answer.
When your enemy is so bad he is literally Hitler, you must go to war. And all is fair in love and war. The rules no longer apply.
The Times decided to go to war against Trump during the 2016 election in an editorial titled “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.”
He was such a dangerous threat (literally Hitler) “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.”
The paper of record had openly endorsed fake news by abandoning the basic principles of journalism.
The Times announced the new rules: there are no rules.
That set the tone for the rest of the media.
The gloves were off. Since the rules no longer applied, reporting the facts and the truth didn’t matter. All that mattered was winning the war. Ideology trumped everything. Their mission was no longer to report the news. It was to push the left’s agenda and candidates. Facts, truth, and objectivity were the necessary casualties of war. Our Democracy was at stake, doncha know?
That suited rank and file journalists just fine. They were free to pursue the glory of Emmys and Pulitzers without those pesky rules about fact checking and verification. Besides, they were the fact checkers. And they made up their own facts.
Two critical examples leap to mind.
It took the New York Times and the Washington Post two years to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real, long after censoring all the horribly damaging revelations it contained that likely would have sunk his father’s presidential run in 2020.
(The papers never bothered mentioning those 51 “national security experts” who claimed the laptop story was probably Russian disinformation were dead wrong – because they were almost certainly lying in order to help elect Biden. And lying was okay under the new rules.)
It took Snopes, the legacy media and deep state’s pet “fact checker”, SEVEN YEARS to be shamed into finally admitting “Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists 'Very Fine People'” back in 2017.
President Biden repeated that lie over and over, right up until his reelection campaign imploded. But the media couldn’t be bothered to correct him. Hey, it was his truth.
These are symptoms of the bigger picture: the media mindset had changed. By 180 degrees. Call it the Woodward-Bernstein syndrome.
Reporters didn’t want to merely chronicle history. They wanted to make it. They wanted to become participants. Movers and shakers who could topple the powerful. They wanted to become powerful, themselves. They came to desire the acquisition of power more than anything. Certainly more than truth.
They reasoned, why not? They were always the smartest people in the room. How did they know that? Because everyone in the room always agreed with them.
But they lost sight of the fact that theirs is a small room. And our nation is a big country. And they hardly speak for all of us, no less a majority.
When journalists think giving their opinions is more important than reporting facts they are no longer reporting the news – they are reporting their own views.
That is how we got fake news – opinions masquerading as facts.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski let the cat out of the bag when she said the quiet part out loud on live television:
"He (Trump) is trying to undermine the media, trying to make up his own facts, and it could be that, while unemployment and the economy worsens (sic), he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think, and that is our job."
She really thinks her job is to tell people what to think.
Well, if you’re a radical-left Democrat, yes. You trust big media to tell you what to think. Normal Americans prefer to think for themselves.
But it is the subtext to what Brzezinski said that is so telling: we don’t report the news – we MAKE the news.
And that’s how hubris killed journalism.
Tired of playing the impartial referee, journalists chose to become participants and advocates. That didn’t just lead to the rise of fake news. It led to the rise of propaganda over reporting. That led to journalists believing their own propaganda. And that led to some psychotic delusions untethered to reality.
Case in point – check out this rant last week from Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin trying in vain to come to terms with Trump’s victory.
She wasn’t satisfied with just calling Trump, “a man who has declared war on democracy and on the free press.”
Rubin went fully delusional, deliriously claiming:
"You can't talk broad themes. You have to boil it down to nuts and bolts, and you have to be pithy. What do I mean by pithy? How about this: Republicans want to kill your kids. It's actually true."
This illustrates what killed the big-media fake-news complex.
It wasn’t Trump.
It was suicide.
No sane and normal person has any reason to believe the media anymore.
Democrat leaders realize they lost touch with reality
Following their disastrous drubbing in the election, losing the Senate, the House, and the White House, a few key Democrats are beginning to recognize how their narrative lost touch with reality.
They recognize the mistake of focusing on identity politics and imaginary issues (Trump is literally Hitler) instead of the real issues: inflation, immigration, crime.
In the immediate fallout, House Democrats dumped Nancy Pelosi as their leader after her clumsy coup against Biden, leading to the Harris debacle.
Democrats, at least some, may have also dumped Pelosi’s politics of hate. She was a broken record, always hitting the same screechy one note – constantly attributing Trump’s popularity to a racism, sexism, and homophobia in GOP voters that really existed only in her mind.
The new Democratic leadership may have seen the light.
Pelosi’s replacement, new House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, appears more in touch with reality. He says Trump did not win because of racism and sexism. It was the economy, stupid.
"Particularly when you consider that in many communities of color, there was movement away from the Democratic candidate and toward the former president," he explained.
It wasn’t her race or gender that cost Harris the election. It was her policies. And her economy. It was the high cost of living. Inflation was the biggest issue.
Democrats are forced to realize some basic truths – Republican voters are not racist or sexists. GOP victories were propelled by women and a record support of minorities. The GOP is now the party of the working class and people of all races.
If Democratic leadership has truly seen the light, it can now begin moving away from woke and back toward reality.
Now it’s the media’s turn to come back to reality.
Trump is giving the national media the opportunity to come to the same sobering realization: they lost touch with reality.
The way back is to get back to basics: start reporting facts again and stop trying to be power players.
Just do your job.
The same is true of our state media.
They missed the boat on all the important issues.
We will give them a map back to reality and credibility in part two of this story.
Garth Kant is Senior Press Secretary of the Ohio Senate Majority Caucus. He spent 25 years writing and producing television news for CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and local affiliates. He spent five years covering Capitol Hill and the White House as a print reporter. He is the author of the McGraw-Hill textbook "How To Write Television News."