by Aditi Roy
We’ve reached a point in journalism and media where truth and objectivity are no longer an option. Americans are being lied to on a daily basis by political pundits, talking heads, entertainment figures, and even fact checking sites! It’s no surprise that 60% of Americans do not trust the media. When anyone decides to run for president, her/his 
policies, personal life, successes, and failures should be subject to the highest criticism and scrutiny from an objective standpoint, regardless of their party affiliation. Alas, journalistic integrity died when these so-called reporters decided
to abandon the impartiality with which they are to report the news, and instead decided that working as liberal Washington’s PR team was a more noble profession.
The bias within the mainstream media is painfully obvious. They hated Bush so the coverage during his presidency was actually critical, but now they love Obama and the Democrats, so naturally they won’t cover his wrongdoings, even though they have admitted that his administration is the LEAST transparent in presidential history. Throughout his presidency, the Obama administration sent the Justice Department after AP and Washington Post journalists who attempted to cover negative stories about him, yet the mainstream media didn’t think that this was worthy of reporting. They love the Democrats so much that they’ll do their best to get Democrats elected into office this November. As a matter of fact, journalists have donated a staggering $382,000 to Clinton’s campaign, compared to $14,000 to Trump’s campaign. So-called debate “moderators” are overwhelmingly liberal, and it shows in their refusal to press Hillary Clinton as much as they do Trump. Some, like Martha Raddatz, are cozy with the Obama administration; she had President Obama in attendance at her wedding to her former husband Julius Genachowski, who was Obama’s Federal Communications Commission chairman. These journalists are literally in bed with leftist politicians and bureaucrats. In fact:
- NBC Senior Deputy Political Editor Mark Murray is married to Obama appointee Sasha Johnson (who also worked for CNN), who is chief of staff at the Federal Aviation Administration
- Former ABC News Executive Producer Ian Cameron married Susan Rice, a U.S. National Security Adviser for the Obama administration, in 1992.
- CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and is an Advisor on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. These ties were evident when CBS News decided not to report on an email written by Ben Rhodes that demonstrated the talking points of the Obama administration after the 2012 attacks in Benghazi left four Americans dead.
- ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
- Former ABC News and Univision reporter Matthew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan, Obama’s Former Deputy Press Secretary and now chief of Organization for Action, a group that emerged out of Obama’s reelection campaign.
- Former ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of United States Deputy Secretary of Energy for the Obama administration, Elizabeth Sherwood
- CNN’s Washington Deputy Bureau Chief and Vice President Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary Clinton’s Former Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.
Journalists don’t even attempt to hide their close ties to the White House. You have events like the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, where the members of the media, who are supposed to report every detail of the president’s actions to the public, are invited to the White House to dine with politicians, who are supposed to be serving the public. It can be argued that this dinner serves as a motivating factor for journalists to report White House ordeals in a favorable and propagandistic manner in hopes of being re-invited next year. The job description for the members of the media is no longer to keep politicians accountable for their actions, but to build good relationships with high profile politicians so they can get their all-access passes to Washington and then not do their jobs as reporters.
The media has abandoned its loyalty to report to the American people, and instead pledged its loyalty to Washington insiders to report on behalf of them. How did we get to this point? In the 1950s, reporters would present facts and evidence to the public, and separate them from opinions and biases which were restricted to op-ed pages, and it was up to the consumers to come to their own conclusions. As time went on, journalistic standards began to decline. In 2006, print revenue was a $46.6 billion dollar industry, and by 2014 fell to $16.4 billion dollar, and the steadily increasing $3.5 billion dollar digital media industry has not been able to make up the difference. 
This gap has been filled with social media and the blogging world. The internet’s ever increasing prominence has caused media sites to measure their success based on the number of clicks on their articles, not objectivity, to make up for their declining revenue. This might explain why from 1/1/16 to 6/1/16, ABC, CBS, and NBC gave four times more airtime to Trump’s controversies than Clinton’s controversies.
Six media giants control 90% of the American media, from your news, to the radio, and entertainment. 
Which might explain why almost every talk show host, actor, musician, comedian, and the rest of Hollywood has the exact same political opinion, and if they don’t, they are ridiculed and dismissed for their beliefs. Just look at how Caitlyn Jenner was viewed as a champion of transgender rights; she received Glamour’s Woman of the Year Award even though she killed someone in a car crash and was not charged, but wasn’t condemned by the left until she said that it was harder coming out as a Republican than coming out as trans. But I digress. So here are six times the media abandoned objectivity in favor of double standards to sell their leftist narratives in this election cycle.
- The Nude Statues
Remember the outrage over the naked Donald Trump statue that appeared in major U.S. cities amongst pedestrians and news outlets? Of course you don’t, because there was none. In fact, after “The Emperor With No Balls” statues went up, it was praised, ridiculed, and people took pictures with it. There was no question of sexism when talking about a presidential candidate’s genitals. But when an artist tried to put up his similarly unflattering nude Hillary statue in Manhattan, there was media and public outrage. People tried to take it down, calling it “sexist” and “misogynistic”. Perhaps it was sexist and misogynistic to put up a nude Hillary statue because she’s a woman. Too bad this logic didn’t apply to Melania Trump, when the New York Post published Melania’s nude photos and titled the piece “The Ogle Office”, and the media dragged her through the mud for her racy modeling pictures.. I believe liberals call this “slut-shaming”, but remember, it’s only sexist if it’s against a Democrat!
- Tax Returns vs. Wikileaks
When The New York Times illegally released Trump’s tax returns from 20 years ago, they were praised. When Wikileaks released emails from members of the Clinton campaign, they were deemed a Russian conspiracy. CNN’s Chris Cuomo patronizingly told viewers that it was illegal to possess the documents unless they were the media, and that the only way to learn about the contents in the emails was through them. This would imply that the emails were not fabricated. Yet the Clinton campaign and members of the media continue to propagate the lie that they are falsified documents. Wikileaks has a ten year history of being 100% accurate. That is WAY more credibility than the mainstream media will have. Wikileaks releases have previously helped Democrats, like in 2008 when they released Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin’s emails, but now of course when the Democrats get hacked, Wikileaks is not credible.
Contrast this with illegal release of Donald Trump’s tax returns. The New York Times never asked Trump for permission when they illegally released his tax returns after endorsing Hillary Clinton. Executive editor Dean Baquet said he was willing to risk jail time to publish them. If they’re so unconcerned with consent, why were NYT journalists emailing the Clinton campaign asking for permission to use quotes from their own interview with Hillary? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcATG9Qy_A
Nevertheless, even the amount of time the media has covered these two stories are drastically different. Over the span of just two days, ABC, NBC, and CBS spent 49 minutes and 32 seconds on Trump’s tax returns. On Univision and Telemundo from October 7th to October 20th, Clinton’s Wikileaks scandal had received just 12 minutes and 11 seconds of coverage.
- The Sex Stuff
Sexual assault is a very touchy subject (no pun intended). Some people believe that anyone who claims to be sexually assaulted should be believed, while others believe that those accused are innocent until proven guilty. Regardless of your stance on this, your logic should be applicable to all cases. But the media’s selective reasoning on this issue is appalling. Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton have been accused of sexual assault, yet ABC news refers to Bill Clinton’s as “sexual misconduct.” The Trump tapes and allegations have received 63 minutes of airtime on Univision and Telemundo between 10/7/16 and 10/20/16. The NYT wrote a story back in May, “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private” in attempts to defame Trump. They interviewed women who had worked with him in the past and framed their stories in a way that would make him appear predatory and malicious. After the piece was published, one of the women interviewed, Rowanne Brewer Lane, stated that the NYT had completely misrepresented what she was trying to say and that she was actually supportive of him. They have been working overtime to make sure Trump’s accusers have their voices heard, meanwhile ignoring the women that have accused Bill Clinton.
Instead of also giving coverage to Bill Clinton’s sexual assault victims, the media portrayed Hillary as a victim of “Trump’s vicious attacks” and her husband’s “affairs.” Never mind that Hillary allegedly worked to silence and intimidate Bill’s victims with IRS audits. Trump’s alleged sexual assaults were never referred to as “infidelities” or “affairs,” yet Bill Clinton gets a free pass when he has been accused of the same things throughout his political career, and they are called infidelities and affairs. Rape and sexual assault are not infidelities, and to call them as such implies that these abuses were consensual. So why the double standard with the way these accusations are reported? Why ask Ivanka Trump about her father’s alleged sexual assaults, but never ask Chelsea Clinton the same thing?
- The KKK Endorsements
According to the mainstream media, Trump is a racist for not immediately disavowing support from former KKK leader David Duke when he was questioned on CNN by Jake Tapper. Yet Hillary Clinton has never been questioned for taking $20,000 of KKK money, or her endorsement by KKK Grand Dragon Will Quigg, or the support of her mentor, former KKK member Robert Byrd. 
She was also never questioned about the endorsement of the Orlando shooter’s homophobic Taliban-supporting father, Seddique Mateen. In fact, ABC, CBS, and NBC spent 18 minutes slamming Trump for not immediately disavowing David Duke, even though he already had disavowed him at that point, and spent less than 2 minutes covering Seddique Mateen’s endorsement of Clinton.
- Rigged Elections
You have Democrats like Obama, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders saying that “the system is rigged” and no one bats an eye. So when Trump says the system is rigged, he is slammed by the media and by President Obama, who accused him of “undermining our democracy” by trying to “sow the seeds of doubt in people’s mind about the legitimacy of our elections.” This was after Project Veritas Action released a second video exposing the DNC, where Scott Foval, the Deputy Political Director at People For The American Way, admits that the Democrats would bus people in mass to commit voter fraud, but now they use rental cars because it’s “harder to prove voter fraud.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yZqsDUbKI
Trump saying that the election was rigged resulted in Chris Wallace asking him if he would accept the results of the elections at the third presidential debate. When he said that he would wait until the election to decide, the headlines the morning after the third debate slammed him for this statement, and Democrats called it “horrifying” and “Un-American.” Yet they seem to have forgotten their behavior after Al Gore lost in 2000. He refused to concede the results of the election and kept fighting against the Florida Supreme Court. In 2014, former President Jimmy Carter also insisted that Bush did not win the 2000 election. The Democrats even accused Bush of a coup and Hillary Clinton continued to say that Bush was “selected” by the court, not democratically elected. But this didn’t matter to the mainstream media when they decided to run the stories the next day.
- The “Tolerant Left” vs. the “Violent Right”
The violence at Trump rallies has gathered a lot of media attention this election cycle, and perpetuated the lie that all Trump supporters were aggressive, violent, and racist. For months, the media continued to propagate the lie that Trump supporters were violent against “peaceful protesters” despite obvious video evidence uploaded by attendees of Trump rallies showing otherwise. Even though Trump supporters were the ones getting eggs thrown at them, suckerpunched, and harassed, the media tried to portray the protesters, who were actually the instigators, as the victims of bigoted violence. So how did the media respond when irrefutable video recordings were released by Project Veritas Action of DNC operatives admitting to paying trained agitators to instigate violence at Trump rallies? CBS dedicates less than three minutes to the story, and claimed that there was no evidence that the Clinton campaign had any knowledge of it, despite the fact that Scott Foval on video said “the [Hillary Clinton] campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, the Foval Group goes and executes the shit on the ground.” Foval also said, “I’m saying we have mentally ill people, that we pay to do shit, make no mistake.” see video here
In addition to the media ignoring outright assaults of Trump supporters, little media coverage was given to a GOP campaign office being firebombed in the middle of the night. The coverage that the attack did receive on NBC, of course blamed Trump for his campaign filled with “undertones of violence”. Not once did the report mention that the building was spray painted on the side with “Nazi Republicans, leave town or else” or try to show the extent of the damage done.
These examples offer only a small glimpse into the mainstream media bias just in this election cycle alone. The fact of the matter is the mainstream media cannot be trusted to deliver objective news reports to the American people. It is evident that they will continue to report stories in a manner that advances their political agenda, instead of advancing a narrative of truth.
References:
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/trust-news/
http://www.journalism.org/2011/05/09/top-25/
http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/
http://www.journalism.org/files/2016/06/PJ_16.06.15_SONM2016_datagallery_PrimeTimeViewership.png
http://clashdaily.com/2015/02/propaganda-dont-think-theres-liberal-media-bias-read/
https://www.truthorfiction.com/susan-rice-ian-cameron-highlight-media-incest-list/
https://www.prageru.com/courses/political-science/can-you-trust-press
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/10/17/20330/journalists-shower-hillary-clinton-campaign-cash
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/politics/obama-donald-trump-rigged-election/index.html
http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/media-outraged-trump-concede-results-something-dems-2000/