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The legacy press exposed its bias for all to see during the Trump era. What makes you think they are a trustworthy source of news now?

If you remember the Donald Trump presidency, you would have noticed how hard the media was on him. One study showed that 94 percent of cable news stories gave Trump negative coverage.

Now that Joe Biden is in office, the coverage is overwhelmingly positive. So far under Biden, the Taliban has overrun Afghanistan, Russia has invaded Ukraine, five million people have illegally entered the US through its southern border, inflation and fuel prices are at record highs, and the cost of living has soared for Americans.

But according to the media, President Biden is every man’s hero. Look at how our ABC covers him. We’re told that he’s saving the planet, tackling inflation, kicking goals on healthcare, and putting historic political wins on the board:

Remember how the media pointed out every gaffe of Trump’s? Meanwhile, Joe Biden falls asleep on live TV, checks his watch during funerals, keeps thinking Kamala Harris is president, walks away from hard questions, falls off his bike — and we hardly hear a whisper about it.

You don’t have to like Trump to see the double standard here.

The Media’s Bias Runs Deep

I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the media’s bias about Trump. If you assume the American — and indeed the Australian — press was telling the truth about Trump, you would have believed that:

Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people”. That never happened.

Trump suggested that people drink bleach to fight COVID. That never happened.

Trump had protesters cleared near the White House so he could pose for a photo op with a Bible. That never happened.

If you trusted the media, you would have thought that Donald Trump was actually a Russian asset — a ‘Manchurian candidate’ planted by the Kremlin to keep Hillary Clinton out of office.

The media ran with the ‘Russian collusion’ smear for four years – through Trump’s entire presidency. In the end, after a $32 million investigation, it was discovered that the ‘evidence’ the media relied on for that claim was fake, and it was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Not only that, but the FBI helped launder the lie to the American public.

More Lies from the Mainstream Press

Probably the worst example of all was the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Just weeks before the 2020 election, a laptop turned up that appeared to belong to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. It had evidence of vast Biden family corruption — monetising their surname to make millions from corrupt countries.

The laptop and the evidence on it were verifiably real, but the media refused to cover the story for fear that if they did, Trump would defeat Biden in the election.

Then Big Tech got involved. Twitter and Facebook locked the account of the New York Post — the Trump-friendly paper that broke the story. And they censored anyone who shared it.

Again, you don’t have to like Donald Trump. You can hate him if you like. But if this isn’t high-level corruption, I don’t know what is.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, calls this the Sovietization of the American Press. Taibbi isn’t a conservative, but he has lived and worked in Russia and other former Soviet lands. He writes that “coverage of Biden increasingly resembles official press releases, often featuring embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions.”

Another example of this bias in America is the 2020 George Floyd riots. The media was rightly critical of the January 6 raid on the Capitol — and we still haven’t heard the end of that saga.

But in 2020, over $1 billion of damage was unleashed as mobs rioted in hundreds of American cities all through the summer. 32 people lost this lives — many of them been to death in public. But because the cause was left-wing — so-called “racial justice”, the media called them “mostly peaceful protests”.

That’s not journalism. It’s undiluted propaganda.

That’s America: What About Australia?

I make no apologies for focussing on America. Much of our news filters down from the United States, and American culture shapes ours.

But if we turn to Australia, the situation isn’t much better. In a survey of Australian journalists, almost two-thirds indicated that they’d vote Labor or Greens, while only 30 per cent said they’d vote for the Coalition.

If we look at just Fairfax — so that’s The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, Nine News and lots of others, the bias was even worse. 75 per cent of Fairfax journalists favoured a Labor-Greens government, while only 20 per cent would vote Coalition.

At News Limited, the results were similar: 66 per cent favoured Labor or the Greens, while only 27 expressed support for the Coalition.

The bias was most obvious at the ABC, which you and I pay for with our taxes to a tune of $1.3 billion a year. At the ANC, over 41 per cent said they’d vote for the minor progressive-left Greens party (a rate four times the national average); 32 per cent favoured Labor; and less than 15 per cent indicated support for the centre-right Coalition.

With numbers like this, it’s no wonder we see political bias in the media’s reporting. The great Francis Schaeffer was ahead of his time when he warned in 1977:

“When the perspective and the worldview of the elite coincides with some of the influential news carriers — it does not have to be all — then either consciously or unconsciously, the media becomes an instrument for manipulation.”

More than ever before, Christians must use godly discernment in how they consume mainstream reporting. We must keep front of mind the simple fact that the legacy press no longer exists to inform us but rather to form our worldview, beliefs — and our vote at the next election.

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Image by Bruno Figueiredo on Unsplash.