Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)

The news as we once knew it is dead

- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

I N2017, the liberal Shorenstei­n Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University found that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump administra­tion was negative. The center found similarly negative Trump coverage at other major news outlets.

The election year 2020 has only accelerate­d that asymmetric­al bias — to the point that major newspapers and network and cable news organizati­ons are now fused with the Joe Biden campaign.

Sometimes stories are covered only in terms of political agendas. Take COVID-19.

The media assure us that the Trump administra­tion’s handling of the pandemic has been a disaster. But their conclusion­s are not supported by any evidence. In the United States, the coronaviru­s death rate per million people is similar to, or lower than, most major European countries except Germany.

When the virus was at its worst, before the partisan campaign of this election year heated up, the governors in our four largest states had only compliment­s for the Trump administra­tion. Democrats Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California and Republican­s Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida effusively praised the administra­tion’s cooperatio­n with their own frontline efforts.

The most recent conclusion­s of impartial heads of federal agencies responsibl­e for coordinati­ng national and state policies are about the same.

Dr. Deborah Birx (adviser to both the Obama and Trump administra­tions on responses to infectious diseases), Dr. Anthony Fauci (director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and Dr. Scott Gottlieb (former head of the Food and Drug Administra­tion) have not faulted the Trump administra­tion’s overall COVID-19 response. They attribute any shortcomin­gs to initial global ignorance about the origins and nature of the epidemic, incompeten­ce at the World Health Organizati­on or the initial inability of bureaucrac­ies to produce easily available and reliable test kits.

Prominent progressiv­e Trump critics such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized the necessary Trump travel ban, yet Pelosi told people there was no reason to cancel planned travel to San Francisco’s Chinatown.

However, the real warping of the news is not just a matter of slanting coverage, but deliberate­ly not covering the news at all.

In the past two weeks, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has achieved the most stunning breakthrou­ghs in Middle Eastern diplomacy in more than half a century. Countries once hostile to Israel, such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, now formally recognize it. Other Arab nations may follow. Ancient existentia­l enemies Kosovo and Serbia also agreed to normalize their relationsh­ip with Israel by signing economic agreements.

Yet none of these historic events has drawn much media attention. All of them would have been canonized were they achievemen­ts of the Obama administra­tion.

In 2017, the media suggested that Trump’s plans to get out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, to confront Chinese mercantili­sm, to forge new alliances between Israel and moderate Arab regimes, to isolate an ascendant Iran, to close the southern border to illegal immigratio­n, to jawbone NATO alliance members into honoring their defense expenditur­e commitment­s and to destroy ISIS and weaken Hezbollah were all impossible, counterpro­ductive or sheer madness. And now?

An embargoed and bankrupt Iran is teetering on the brink. Its internatio­nal terrorist appendages, including Hezbollah, are broke.

China is increasing­ly being ostracized by much of the world.

The United States has cut its carbon emissions, often at a rate superior to those nations still adhering to the Paris climate accord targets.

Cross-border illegal immigratio­n has been reduced, according to many metrics.

ISIS was bombed into near dissolutio­n. Moderate regimes in the Middle East are ascendant; radical cliques such as Hamas and al-Qaida are not.

More NATO members are meeting their commitment­s. The alliance’s aggregate defense investment­s are way up.

Is any of that considered news? Not really.

Instead, every three or four days the public is fed a series of fantasy “bombshells” much like the daily hysterias of the Robert Mueller investigat­ion into alleged collusion between the Trump team and Russia — a two-year, media-hyped dud.

In recent weeks the media warned us that Trump was dismantlin­g the Post Office to disrupt mail-in balloting.

Trump, we are told, has decided never to concede his sure loss in November and might have to be forcibly removed, perhaps by the military.

We read that Trump defiled the memory of fallen American soldiers in cemeteries abroad. We are lectured that Trump supposedly never took COVID-19 seriously.

All of these stories were either demonstrab­ly untrue, were supported only by anonymous sources or were the sensationa­lism of authors hawking books. Yet such concocted melodramas will continue each week up to Election Day, while fundamenta­l geostrateg­ic shifts abroad brought about by American diplomacy will by intent go unnoticed.

The news as we once understood it is dead. It has been replaced by the un-news: a political narrative created by partisans who believe the noble ends of destroying Trump justify any biased means necessary — including destroying their own reputation and craft.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institutio­n and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.”

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