As he often did when considering individual and collective liberties, Thomas Jefferson succinctly defined the intimate relationship between a free press and a free people.
His 1787 letter to a delegate attending the Continental Congress contains a warning for the ages: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, … were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter…”
The foremost question before our Founders was always whether a representative democracy could sustain itself amidst the excesses and passions that typically governed 13 fractious colonies with ambitions to become a truly United States. Optimists like Jefferson believed that a free press was the prerequisite of a truly representative democracy; indeed, without an aggressively well-informed electorate, how could democracy even function?
One can only wonder what the sage of Monticello would make of this week’s startling news from the Media Research Council. The MRC analyzed ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News,” and “CBS Evening News” from January 20 through April 9 and found 899 stories that discussed President Trump or the Trump administration. The media watchdog group found that 92.2% of the coverage was negative compared to only 7.8% positive.
The watchdog group also noted that these percentages were even more lopsided than in his first term, “when Trump was besieged with relentlessly hostile coverage.”
Underlying the sharply sagging credibility of the legacy media lurks a growing consensus that god-awful lies have become the stock-in-trade of normal press coverage. To cite several of the more notorious examples: Joe Biden’s deteriorating physical and mental condition; the Hunter Biden laptop story/coverup; the blatant lies of the 51 senior intelligence officers insisting that the laptop story was all Russian disinformation; and extent to which Barack Obama was effectively serving out his third term while Oval Office puppet-masters blithely insisted everything was in order.
Contrast those prevarications with the multi-layered wrong-doing now galvanizing every newscast despite glib Democratic mutterings about oligarchies. When we are discovering that whole agencies of our government were complicit in the systematic looting of the American treasury, is it too much to wonder why our media munchkins maintained such a studious silence about our looming national bankruptcy? While attending the posh annual banquets of the White House Correspondents Association, were there no Pulitzer-hungry whistleblowers brave enough to wonder how long this corruption would go undetected?
