Ari Fleischer: Biden's inflection point will be midterms
Fox News' Ari Fleischer analyzes the left's current political strategy and how it will affect Democrats' faith in Biden come midterms
PROGRAMMING ALERT: Watch Ari Fleischer discuss this topic and more on July 12 on "The Ingraham Angle" at 10 pm ET on Fox News Channel
In June 2021, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism asked people in 46 countries how much they trust their nation’s media. The results were devastating for American journalism – the United States came in last place.
American media are the least trusted in the world. Only 29% of the American people trust the media, the survey found, the very bottom of the international barrel. (Finland is in first place, with 65% saying they trust their media. Canadian media, for comparison’s sake, enjoy a 45% level of trust.)
Most reporters when they hear this will think, "There’s something wrong with the American people." Most Americans will think, "There’s something wrong with the media."
This was one of my many findings in my just-released book, "Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong – And Just Doesn’t Care" (Broadside Books, July 12, 2022).
ARI FLEISCHER WRITES NEW BOOK ON WHY THE LIBERAL MEDIA KEEPS GETTING THE NEWS WRONG
America’s mainstream media is in decline and denial, and neither is good for our country. It’s important for our democracy that people can trust what they read and see on the news. But after four years of watching much of the press corps do everything in its power to reverse the results of the 2016 election, I had enough. I watched the press suppress news they didn’t like and deceive people by airing false stories.
Newsrooms overwhelmingly consist of like-minded, cut-from-the-same-cloth, tweet-the-same-thing people who have alienated most gun owners, people who go to church regularly, live in rural areas or think life begins at conception.
Remember when the press told you the Steele dossier might be true? Or that President Trump removed blue mail boxes from street corners so he could steal the 2020 election? Or that Russia paid bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan? Or that COVID could not possibly have originated in a Chinese lab? Or that Melania Trump turned the Rose Garden into a neofascist parade ground? Or that Nicholas Sandmann was a thug and Kyle Rittenhouse a White supremacist? Each of these is wrong. Each was reported by the mainstream media.
First lady Melania Trump after speaking during the Governors' Spouses' luncheon at the White House, Feb. 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
I try to call the balls and strikes as I see them. I supported President Trump on many if not most of his policies, while I objected to the way he sometimes behaved. But too many reporters decided their job was to undo the will of the people who elected Trump in 2016, and their reporting was brutally unfair and biased. These reporters thought they were saving the Republic. Instead, they sacrificed their credibility.
I don’t think the press is the enemy of the people, but I do think they are their own worst enemy.
ARI FLEISCHER BLASTS MEDIA FOR 'OFF THE CHARTS' BIAS
My book blows the whistle on the mainstream media. It names names and cites example after example of wrong, get-Trump-at-any-cost, "reporting," especially at CNN and by The New York Times, each of which gets a chapter in my book.
The problem today is way beyond the issue of liberal bias. It’s cultural. According to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, the only group of Americans who say the press understands them are college-educated Democrats. The majority of Democrats with a high school degree say the press doesn’t understand them. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans say the press doesn’t understand them. Independents are similarly minded.
Journalism has an original sin. It lacks diversity. Newsrooms don’t think like, act like or register to vote like America. Newsrooms overwhelmingly consist of like-minded, cut-from-the-same-cloth, tweet-the-same-thing people who have alienated most gun owners, people who go to church regularly, live in rural areas or think life begins at conception.
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It’s as if too many reporters think if only those people watched CNN or read the New York Times they would know better than to support Donald Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, or Govs. Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem. Or whoever the GOP nominates for president in 2024.
Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, Feb. 24, 2022. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
Take the White House press corps. I hired a research company to look through public voter registration records of the 49 reporters who sat in the briefing room. They found the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was 12:1!
Imagine how different – and fairer – the news would be if the ratio was even. Imagine how different the news would be if the ratio was 12:1, Republican to Democrat.
The lack of balance in newsrooms helps explain why CNN booked Michael Avenatti almost twice as many times as it booked the entire Trump administration to talk about COVID.
In CNN’s eyes, Avenatti was more newsworthy than everyone from the secretary of Health and Human Services to the surgeon general to Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, combined. Was there no one inside CNN who thought maybe they were booking Avenatti too much? Apparently not.
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I want the press to do better and my book concludes with a recommendation for how they can improve. Our nation will benefit when all of us can read one source of news and accept it as the truth. But so long as the mainstream media act as activists for a cause, that day will be a long way off.
The press is a major reason the American people are so polarized. Isn’t it time we asked if the real problem in America is the "news" coming from the MSM?
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