Are Media Now Taking Orders Straight From The White House?

If you needed further proof that the big media are deeply biased toward the political left, look no further than the recent secret meetings held by the White House with some of its favorite news outlets. Why? To get them to spin bad economic news. And, given the generally low ethics and political bias of their profession, they’ll no doubt willingly do so.

Three top Biden officials appear to be spearheading the effort. Angry at what they see as unfair coverage of Biden’s supposed economic successes, they have decided to hold sub rosa sessions and phone calls as part of an “outreach” to the national media.

The media are of course willing to be used. After all, President Joe Biden’s administration is the furthest left in our nation’s history in the scope and content of its policies.

From the open border that has brought in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to naming out-and-proud Marxist nominees to key administration posts, from COVID lockdowns that have divided our nation but not stopped the Wuhan bug, to non-stop “stimulus” spending that has set off the worst inflation in decades, Biden literally has nothing to brag about, as we noted earlier this week.

President Jimmy Carter can now rest easy. He’s no longer the worst president of the postwar era. Biden is.

The White House decision to reach out to the media apparently came after a Dec. 3 rant by leftist Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who claims the media are treating Biden worse than they treated President Donald Trump — a laughable idea on its very face, given Biden’s spectacular failures on issue after issue, and the nonstop vitriol and scorn directed at Trump during his four years in office.

The three officials — National Economic Council Deputy Directors David Kamin and Bharat Ramamurti and port czar John Porcari — felt the bang-up job they were doing wasn’t getting through to the public.

So the Biden administration has been “briefing major newsrooms over the past week” and “discussing with newsrooms trends pertaining to job creation, economic growth, supply chains, and more,” a CNN newsletter reported, citing an anonymous source for its scoop.

“I’m told the conversations have been productive, with anchors and reporters and producers getting to talk with the officials,” the newsletter breathlessly informs us. Yes, they’re taking their marching orders like good soldiers in the never-ending propaganda war.

Already, we’ve heard the administration claim that “the country’s economy is in much better shape than it was last year.” With surging inflation, shrinking real wages and the very real prospect of enormous tax hikes in the near future to pay for the disastrous Build Back Better bill, it’s a wonder they can say that with a straight face.

That means it’s time for the already-pliable media to gaslight an unsuspecting public by telling it that, hey, all that misery you think you’re feeling right now from vaccine mandates, supply shortages, rampant inflation and millions of lost jobs that haven’t returned is really just the pangs of economic success.

As Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar played by Jon Lovitz on “Saturday Night Live,” might say: “Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

Imagine for a moment something similar took place in the Trump White House. The press would have screamed loud and long about Trump’s “fascism,” about attempts to “intimidate the media,” and no doubt would have wailed about the “threats to the First Amendment” such behavior posed.

Yet, media see no such threats today from their passive compliance with the White House propaganda machine.

The idea that the media need to be goaded into protecting the Biden administration is a literal joke.

After all, this is a year in which the media systematically ignored Hunter Biden’s possibly criminal behavior; stonewalled the revelation that the Steele Dossier which allegedly “proved” collusion between Trump and the Russians was really a put-up job by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee; refused to report the growing evidence that, as Trump said, the Wuhan virus actually came from a Chinese government laboratory; pretended Biden wasn’t showing signs of age-related mental impairment; and, until recently, behaved as if Vice President Kamala Harris was competent, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Essentially, the media have shredded their reputations to protect the increasingly far-left Democratic Party from its badly needed reckoning with the voters.

But this is nothing new. As Steve McCann noted recently at the American Thinker in a scathing review of the media’s performance over the last eight decades, “the legacy of the mainstream media is that it has always been the cheerleaders and propaganda arm of the left and the Democrat Party.”

He’s not alone.

“The mainstream media such as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and others in the United States have chosen their sides,” our friends at TIPP Insights wrote a week ago. “The sides they have chosen are indiscriminately left-leaning. These outlets will stop essentially at nothing in their zeal to be the acting voice pieces of the Democratic Party.”

It’s a good thing that people increasingly recognize the media’s mendacity and refusal to reform their systematic bias.

For instance, a Rasmussen survey last summer found just 34% saying they thought journalists sought to be objective, while “46% believe most reporters don’t even bother trying to overcome their personal biases.” Meanwhile, a Gallup-Knight poll found that 70% of the public believe the media push a political agenda, not the truth.

It’s one thing to influence coverage, another to do so secretly, keeping your readers out of the loop.

The idea of the media strategizing with the government to tell the public lies or slant the news is sickening, a voluntary relinquishing of their First Amendment rights. It’s also a betrayal of their obligations to their readers, who expect the truth from journalists, not biased spin.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board