Mentally Challenged Writer: Media Treats Trump Too Fairly

Salon writer Eric Alterman penned a remarkable piece of nonsense last week, arguing that President Trump is not only a danger to journalists but that he has no reason to bash the media. In Alterman’s deranged view, the “racist, sexist, Islamophobic psychopath” in the Oval Office deserves all of the negative coverage he gets. In fact, he writes, the media has covered Trump with absolute fairness.

“Conservatives are winning a war that liberals, centrists and, indeed, anyone who believes that politics should be tethered to recognizable reality don’t even know they are fighting,” he argues. “Racism and Islamophobia from outlets like Breitbart and the lunatic ravings of Infowars’ Alex Jones drove the news coverage of the election even in our most prestigious outlets. Twitter and Facebook were dominated by phony stories designed to discredit Clinton, and cable news reinforced these priorities, allowing Trump surrogates to lie with impunity and without correction.”

In other words, not only was media coverage of Trump fair during the election, it was actually and unwittingly biased against Hillary! How do you like that!

“I have long argued against the wall between ‘editorials’ and ‘news,’ because, for most people, it is a distinction without a difference, and provides endless fuel for accusations of ‘liberal bias’ when — owing in significant measure to these same accusations — most media institutions bend over backward to be more than fair to conservative sources and, oftentimes, pseudo-realities,” he writes.

So, in Alterman’s view, the media should simply cast aside any pretense of objectivity and cover these elections according to their well-known and obvious liberal biases. No more talk about Hillary’s emails, Democrat Party fundraising woes, or the ideological fractures tearing the left apart. Certainly, no more coverage of Antifa’s violent antics (which won’t be much of a change.) Just wall to wall anti-Republican coverage so that the country finally GETS IT. In this context, of course, “getting it” means to finally buy into the insane, ultra-liberal worldview that you see espoused on sites like Salon.

Fortunately, the country does not appear to have the same view as leftists like Alterman. A new Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 47% of likely U.S. voters feel that “when reporters write or talk about President Trump, they are trying to block the president from passing his agenda.” This, the survey noted, was in sharp contrast to the way Americans felt about the media’s relationship to President Obama:

By comparison, 48 percent of voters said in June 2010 that they thought most reporters when they write or talk about President Obama were trying to help him pass his agenda. Eighteen percent thought most reporters were trying to block Obama from passing his agenda. Twenty-seven percent said the press was simply interested in reporting the news in an unbiased manner.

Alterman wants to media to stop “pretending to be fair and balanced” and just start ripping Trump from the front page to the back.

He doesn’t realize that, to a plurality of Americans, this already appears to be what’s going on.