PARTIAL MEDIA IS FOUND WANTING

IN the media war on Donald Trump, it is the media that is now losing. And losing so badly, I wonder if it can recover.

So many big news outlets now seem dedicated to destroying the President — The New York

Times, CNN and MSNBC, to name just three.

But their open malice and fake news have so exposed them as partisan, who can ever believe again in the myth of journalistic “impartiality”?

Take the Washington Post’s preposterous attempt last week to discredit White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

In last week’s press briefing, Sanders faced down CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who’d demanded she repudiate Trump’s alleged claim that the media was “the enemy of the people”.

Sanders responded that it was “ironic” to hear journalists “attack the President for his rhetoric when they frequently lower the level of conversation”. Too true. Think of New York

Times columnist Thomas Friedman last month calling Trump “treasonous”. Think of nearly two years of hysterical and unfounded media reporting on Trump’s “collusion” with Russia to steal the presidency.

Sanders then listed some of the media attacks that have made her the first White House spokesman to need Secret Service protection: the media “said I should be harassed, as a life sentence” and “I should be choked”.

No so, crowed a Washington

Post fact-checker: “Her evidence was lacking.” No journalist had wanted to “choke” her — just “wring her neck”. No journalist had urged “lifelong harassment” of her — just to have protesters make her “uncomfortable” as a “life sentence”.

See the difference? Nor do I. But even in reporting this dustup, many in the media proved that they simply cannot report Trump fairly. The Associated Press, for instance, in reports published here, claimed that Sanders had “refused to distance herself from Donald Trump’s assertions that the media is ‘the enemy of the people’”.

This is fake news. I cannot find one instance of Trump saying the entire media is the enemy of the people. He’s attacked only outlets trying hardest to delegitimise and destroy him, as in this tweet last year: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

Put it this way: calling out Acosta is not to say that all journalists are idiots.

But the ones who claim they’ve also been insulted just may be.