After 43 years as a reporter, I’m appalled by what has come over the profession. Rather than cover the news, the vast majority of my counterparts in the mainstream media are fixated on vilifying Donald Trump and pushing anything and everything that runs counter to his Make America Great Again agenda.
From the stage at his rallies, Trump lambasts the “Fake News Media,” challenging them to file at least one positive report about him. At his recent event in Manhattan, l was seated with them in the press pool. When the President said, “Look at all the Fake News back there,” I scanned the faces of my colleagues. They looked miserable. I imagine it must get to them after a while following the mandate of their corporate bosses to “Get Trump.” They give full credence to the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Trump spelled out a comprehensive plan on how he was going to rescue the U.S. economy, fight inflation, close the border, stop the drug scourge, halt the crime wave, and Make America Healthy Again. He shared the stage with an A-list of supporters and a family that makes Hunter Biden look like the drug-addled degenerate that he is. But the mainstream media would have none of it.
The Associated Press followed up the rally with the headline: “Trump's Madison Square Garden Event Features Crude and Racist Insults.” Newsday, Long Island’s daily newspaper, ran with the AP slant, stating in its lead that the former president turned “what his campaign had dubbed as the event where he would deliver his closing message into an illustration of what turns off his critics.”
I can’t believe we were at the same rally. The famed arena was packed to the rafters with more than 20,000 Trump fans in the heart of one of the biggest Democrat cities in America, with an estimated 180,000 more trying to get in. Writing my own stories about the historic event, l made the mistake of going to Google to check on a few facts. I thought l was on the Soviet Pravda homepage. Item after item trashed Trump; I couldn’t find a single nice thing about him. Even the so-called fact-checkers skewed reality with an endless stream of negativity. If you relied solely on Social Media to form your opinion of the 45th president, you would agree with the Hail Mary accusation by his opponent, Kamala Harris, that he’s a Hitler-praising Nazi hell-bent on destroying the American democracy.
Even the international media got into the act. No friend of the United States, Al Jazeera set about to dispute nearly every claim Trump made. “At the rally, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he presided over the most secure border in United States history (he did not), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not deliver hurricane relief because the government spent its money bringing immigrants into the country illegally (it did not) and that foreign nations were emptying their prisons and sending convicts to the US (they are not).” I’m sorry to inform them that a vast number of American voters believe all of this to be true. To back up its claims, the foreign outlet steers you to Politifact, another Trump-deranged site that tears apart everything he says.
You can’t even get a straight scoop from Artificial Intelligence. When I asked Chat GPT about the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, I got this: “The goal was to pressure countries into reducing tariffs on U.S. products, theoretically leveling the playing field for American businesses. However, critics argued it could lead to trade wars, harm consumers with higher prices, and bypass Congress’s trade oversight.”
I experienced firsthand what the Trump Team thinks of the media. Interviewing the “Front Row Joes” waiting at the front of the line to get into the rally, a staffer saw my Press Pass and escorted me out of the queue. I was herded with the rest of the reporters to the media pool toward the back of the venue. Each time I asked to get a little closer to the stage to take a photo, I was firmly rejected.
Trump is running on a MAGA platform, Make America Great Again, an aspiration I imagine the media disagrees with since they’re working overtime to vilify the phrase. A successful businessman lauded for his accomplishments the world over—at least until he ran for office—Trump exudes confidence that he can bring about a new “Golden Age” for America. Making the task easier, he opines, would be an honest Fourth Estate not bending over backwards to take him out.