You Don’t Hate Corporate Media Nearly Enough

Americans’ trust in the news media has plummeted to all-time lows. On the faith scale, journalists rank somewhere between carnies and members of Congress.

Corporate media, with their war on former President Donald Trump — and anyone who even remotely supports him — deserve your loathing. In fact, legendary reporter and media critic Michael Walsh says you probably don’t hate the contemporary American journalism collective nearly enough. 

“You think you can, but you haven’t plumbed the depths of how much you can loathe these people,” Walsh told me in the latest episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour” podcast.  

The award-winning journalist, author and screenwriter is editor of and contributor to the eye-opening new book Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You, a collection of more than two dozen essays from some of the sharpest minds of our time. The book tracks how journalism devolved from a meaningful blue-collar trade to a “consensus” profession of “bubble” elitists who have abandoned editorial ethics, even the First Amendment, for the “higher duty” of promoting and protecting the leftist agenda. 

‘He Provokes Them Simply by Existing’

While Walsh and his co-authors drew from a deep well of shameful journalist behavior in filling the book, it was, of course, published before the corporate media clown show of the past several days. The essays could not capture the accomplice media blaming Trump’s campaign rhetoric for a second attempt on his life or writing off multiple complaints of Haitian refugees doing very concerning things to Springfield, Ohio’s pet and avian population, but they do explain how we got here. 

NBC News anchor Lester Holt, joining a chorus of his corporate media colleagues, told viewers on Sunday that the second assassination attempt against Trump in two months “comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself.” 

Walsh satirically took aim at the absurd framing of the story from the Trump-hating press. It proved to be an encore performance from the same confederacy of dunces that demanded (conservative) politicians “lower the temperature” after a gunman in July shot Trump in the ear, killed one man and seriously injured two others at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. 

“A 78-year-old man really shouldn’t wear short skirts like that out in public. It’s a provocative thing that he does. But then again, he provokes them simply by existing,” Walsh said. Holt and crew are employing corporate media’s most beloved — and bogus — context device, something the New York Times started years ago, according to Walsh. The trick is to cover an event by dragging in “something extraneous … just so you can make your larger narrative.”

‘How the Heck Are You Supposed to Cover Him?’

Journalists have long practiced leftist activism in their reporting, but things went to DEFCON 1 when Trump surprised nearly everyone, the corporate media collective in particular, by winning the GOP nomination and, ultimately, the White House in 2016. 

A New York Times front page declaration of journalistic war in August of that year set the tone for corporate media coverage to come. The piece, penned by leftist media columnist Jim Rutenberg, was headlined, “Trump is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.” The solution, Rutenberg argued, was to give up on objectivity. 

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” he feverishly wrote.

Well, Rutenberg effectively opined to Trump-hating colleagues who didn’t need much coaxing. He conceded that it might not always “seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters,” but who cares about fairness when the world is watching?

“It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable,” Rutenberg asserted. Any illusion of fairness was shattered in the column; most living on the corporate media commune followed his advice to the letter. 

‘Where It Gets Very Dangerous’

Things, as fatigued and frustrated Americans well know, have only gotten worse since. 

“The media is wholly in the tank in a way that it wasn’t even when we started this book a year and a half ago,” Walsh said. “We were guessing that sometime around the election the media would disgrace itself. We just had no idea how badly they would disgrace themselves.” 

Really badly, it turns out. From memory-holing July’s assassination attempt to the ABC-moderated debate that proved an extension of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign to accusing Trump of triggering would-be assassins, it seems as bad as it can get. 

But wait … there’s more. 

Since Covid and the 2020 election, the practitioners of selective objectivity have been working with the Deep State’s version of the Ministry of Truth to silence “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.”  Walsh said they’ve traded in the First Amendment for conformity and consensus. They’ve failed to heed, the reporter added, what Cato’s Letter No. 15 argues is so essential to free government, failing further to see that “where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call any thing else his own.”

“This is the key to the importance of freedom of speech, and yet it is being abandoned in pursuit of what I call in our book’s opening essay a ‘higher loyalty,’” Walsh said. “Just as [former FBI Director] James Comey said he had a higher loyalty than the actual law of the United States of America, journalists have a higher loyalty beyond the First Amendment, and that’s where it gets very dangerous.” 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.