President Trump and everyone else knew that the NBC Townhall exposition would be contentious and that the ABC Townhall with Joe Biden, broadcast at the same time, would be gentle.
And that’s exactly what happened.
The NBC moderator, Savannah Guthrie, was under heavy pressure to make Donald Trump squirm. The left had battered NBC for daring to put the President up directly against Mr. Biden. Apparently, they feared Trump would get higher ratings than Biden.
So Savannah spent almost all her interview time on the liberal attack line: why the President doesn’t promote masks, his taxes, white supremacy, QAnon; the usual greatest hits.
Meanwhile, George Stephanopoulos, an avowed liberal democrat and chief correspondent at ABC News, did not even ask Joe Biden about the biggest political story in America: the exposure of his son Hunter as a person who used his father’s political power to make millions of dollars.
George, of course, knew he would look weak not asking about Hunter but his bosses at Disney, which owns ABC, want Biden to win the election so the fix was in.
That is the state of the corporate media in America today.
The question is, how did the national press become a political entity? Why have standards of journalism collapsed?
The short answer is Donald Trump. Many press chieftains despise the President because they see him as a vulgarian who panders to conservatives. Therefore, they are directing their power to remove him from office, not responsibly seek the truth about his administration.
The long answer is the “media culture.”
Some years ago, Bernard Goldberg wrote a book about CBS News called “Bias” that credibly reports the left wing slant of the organization – an outfit that employed him for more than 20 years.
I worked for CBS for three years and saw what Bernie saw: an organization that valued a liberal point of view. At the time, there was some discipline at CBS News so left wing bias was tamped down on the air, especially in local news where little political spin existed. But the Dan Rather crew was very liberal and hired many like-minded people.
The same culture was in place at NBC News under Tom Brokaw and at ABC News starring Peter Jennings. I worked at ABC for two years and knew Jennings well. He was a social liberal but not aggressively left. The boss at ABC News, Roone Arledge, was in the same category.
But, generally speaking, those managers who did the hiring at all the networks were looking for journalists who would “fit in.” Thus, most network news employees were men and women of the left.
President Reagan was not widely admired in the halls of the three networks. But, again, ideological reporting was keep under control with exceptions like Sam Donaldson. Most of the time, the digs against Mr. Reagan were far more subtle than they are today against Mr. Trump.
The harsh truth is that today most corporate news agencies have openly allied with the Democratic Party. So, President Trump is not only running against a political organization, but also against companies that literally have billions of dollars and thousands of employees lined up to defeat him.
The nation’s two most powerful newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are openly hostile to Donald Trump, as are the wire services which provide articles to smaller papers from coast-to-coast.
If, somehow, President Trump manages to win re-election, it would almost be a miracle and the Vatican should investigate. Never before in American history has the press and the powerful social media corporations joined together in a single mind-set to crush a presidential candidate.
And this colossal Constitutional abuse is happening right before our eyes. As the dueling network Townhalls proved beyond any reasonable doubt.
