With the presidential election now mercifully over, and with a decisive victory for Donald Trump, it’s a good time to mull the steep decline of our mainstream media — and consider how the industry could attempt to recover.
Step 1: Apologize.
A Gallup poll in October found that a meager 31% of Americans trust the mass media “to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly’” — an all-time low.
It’s surprising the number is even that high, after the media relentlessly characterized a candidate who is on the path to overwhelmingly win the presidency into some fringe figure — a racist and a tyrant.
Clearly Americans didn’t buy it.
Instead, they re-elected Trump in a rout.
He is owed an apology — as are his voters.
Much of our so-called mainstream media has openly become an activist operation for Democrats.
It seeps into everything they do.
How can it not?
A 2023 study out of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that “just 3.4% of American journalists identify as Republicans.”
National Public Radio’s Washington, DC, headquarters has “87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None,” The Free Press reported in April.
Of course, news outlets can choose to represent any positions they’re inclined to.
But perhaps it would be good if they were more honest about it.
If The New York Times wants to be a wholly left-leaning paper, it needs to give up the charade that it’s trying to represent all sides or report the news in a dispassionate way.
Take the paper’s headline the day after the election: “Stunning Return to Power After Dark and Defiant Campaign.”
Did we watch the same appearances these last few weeks, where Trump served fries and rode around in a garbage truck?
What was dark, where was the defiance?
After Trump shocked many by defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016, the term “media bubble” arose to explain journalists’ astounding level of surprise.
Politico called that Trump win “an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment.”
Caught flat-footed, media outlets pledged to do better.
They had missed the Trump phenomenon and swore they weren’t going to be shamed again.
So they stocked their rosters with Republicans . . . who hate Donald Trump. Close enough, they figured!
That’s why Step 2 for media recovery is this: To cover Trump’s second term in the White House, hire people who don’t downright despise him.
This year two of the three ostensibly Republican columnists at The New York Times, Bret Stephens and David French, publicized their votes for Kamala Harris.
The third, Ross Douthat, refused to say who he would support.
Over at The Washington Post, supposed conservative opinion-maker Jen Rubin spends most of her time penning unhinged rants against Trump, such as a post-election write-up complaining that Americans are not virtuous because they chose him.
This kind of representation might lead the average Times or WaPo reader to believe that most Republicans do not support Trump — which could not be further from the truth, as the election results exposed.
It’s even worse on television: 100% of the Kamala Harris stories featured on ABC’s World News Tonight, the program hosted by debate moderator David Muir, were positive, the Media Research Center found, while 93% of the show’s Trump coverage was negative.
It’s not just unfair, it’s untrue — and it leads to an uninformed audience.
Few regular voices represent the pro-Trump perspective on the major cable news outlets, with the notable exception of Fox News.
The self-described Republicans on MSNBC and CNN have largely opposed Trump.
And even when they defend his policies, it’s half-hearted.
Trump deserves more than “I’m no fan, but…” rebuttals.
For coverage of his second term to be fair and informative, he deserves what presidents before him have had: commentators willing to offer a full-throated defense of the man and his policies, not only those who must hold their noses when having to talk about him.
And the nation deserves that, too.
Media outlets must respect their audiences enough not to lie to them about reality, and must respect the truth enough to present the full picture of what Trump and his supporters believe.
If they can conquer Step 1 with an apology and a pledge to reform, and Step 2 by hiring sane commentators who don’t hate Trump, perhaps we can arrive at Step 3: the presentation of the news in an unbiased manner, and the rehabilitation of their tattered reputations.
Karol Markowicz is co-author of the book “Stolen Youth.”