We hear lots about the oversize role of the 'liberal' media and its corruption - jettisoning any pretense of a distinction between reporting and commentary. In fact, it often seems as it the routine reporters are expected to amend their own inexpert opinions to the stories they report on TV. And the terminology they use is tinged with obvious value judgements.
I have been told a few times that the media has always been political, and what we are seeing is just business as usual in a fraught time in our history - that there are times in our history in which we see a very partisan press similar to what we are seeing now. No doubt.
Is what we are seeing a matter of difference in kind or degree as compared with recent decades however. This piece thinks it is the former - big time.
"Soviet practices would have once been unthinkable in the U.S. media. But in August 2016, Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for the New York Times, wrote that if journalists believed that Mr. Trump was a “demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies,” it was necessary to “throw out the textbook of American journalism.” The Times started to characterize Mr. Trump’s statements as “lies” in news stories and suppress news that worked to Mr. Trump’s advantage, such as the Hunter Biden story this fall.
The Times also advanced an ideological account of U.S. history, according to which the American Revolution was undertaken to defend slavery, and promoted it over the objections of historians and the paper’s own fact-checkers."
— https://www.wsj.com/articles/soviet-politics-american-style-11608658685
