The Legacy Media Has Passed the Point of No Return

posted by Steve McCann at American Thinker 

Joe Biden’s one major accomplishment during his calamitous tenure as president is to abet the legacy media in their head-first dash into permanent and irretrievable disrepute. The legacy media’s self-prostitution in concealing and downplaying Biden’s accelerating senescence, and mindlessly promoting and justifying the assassination of Donald Trump are the final straws that have sealed their fate.

The Trump-Biden debate on June 27, 2024 exposed that for nearly five years the legacy media has deliberately obfuscated, excused, and outright lied about what was obvious to the bulk of the American citizenry: Biden’s unmistakably accelerating mental infirmity.  Thus, they chose to place the well-being of the nation and its citizens in jeopardy by promoting an obviously compromised and feeble-minded president at the helm.

Concurrent with the cover-up of Biden’s mental deterioration was the legacy media unquestioningly following the lead of Biden and the Democrat party in their incessant drumbeat of maliciously accusing Donald Trump of being another Hitler, an existential threat to democracy, a satanic reprobate, and a budding dictator who would never relinquish power.  Thereby sending a not so subtle message to an army of addled left-wing radicals that assassinating Trump is justified in order to save the country.

The legacy media is overwhelmingly complicit in the assassination attempt of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024.  The vile immediate reaction among many in the legacy media further confirms this complicity.

These two media fiascos have revealed premeditated duplicity and mendacity in what can only be described as the two greatest media scandals in American history.  The legacy media will never recover from these debacles as they were already held in extraordinarily low esteem before they chose to place their parochial interests above that of the nation.

A massive poll of 20,000 participants undertaken by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found that Americans’ hope for and trust in an objective media was all but lost by 2020.  They saw not only an ever-growing partisanship in news reporting but a determination by the legacy media to push a political agenda instead of honestly disseminating the news.

This poll was one of the most devastating indictments of the media in polling history.  Some highlights:

84% of surveyed Americans laid either a moderate or a great deal of the blame for partisan hostility at the feet of the media.

Further, 82% believed news outlets are either deliberately “misrepresenting the facts” or are “making them up entirely”.

This is further amplified as 79% of those surveyed said media outlets are trying to persuade people to adopt a certain opinion about an issue or an individual.

Similarly, while the respondents in the poll believed that the media is “critical” or “very important” to democracy, 86% say they have witnessed either a fair amount or a great deal of bias in news reporting.   Damningly, 78% feel that this bias is reflected in the spread of fake news which “is a major problem” that exceeds all others in the legacy media environment.

While generic faith in the media has been gradually declining over recent decades, this precipitous drop in trust and questions about what motivates the legacy media can be traced to June 2015 and Donald Trump’s entry into the presidential sweepstakes.

Donald Trump’s entry into the presidential field was a godsend to the legacy media which had been hemorrhaging red ink for many years.  The denizens of the media hierarchies knew that unremitting coverage of Trump, a global celebrity, would dramatically increase viewership, clicks on the internet, newspaper readership, and thus their bottom line.

Since they were certain Trump had little chance of winning the presidency, as his foray into politics was, in all likelihood, a publicity stunt, they thought there was no downside.  Moreover, virtually everyone in the legacy media was convinced Hillary Clinton would be the next president, regardless of the overwhelming volume of attention they paid to Trump.  

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, during the campaign, continuously pointed out the left-wing bias and misreporting in the legacy media and popularized a phrase that is now part of the American lexicon: “fake news.”  With his ridicule and mockery, he succeeded in making the media a potent campaign issue and a focal point of voter resentment.

No entity in the United States was more devastatingly affected by the 9.0 magnitude political earthquake that took place on November 8, 2016 than the legacy media.  Not only had they foolishly contributed to the election of Donald Trump, a man they loathed, but they had willingly allowed him to make them the target of national derision and contempt.

After the election, the anger and single-minded determination of the legacy media to seek revenge and prove they could still remove or destroy a president was palpable.  Since November 9, 2016, the groupthink mandated that Donald Trump must be destroyed regardless of the fallout, or potential destruction of trust in the media, or the future well-being of the country.

The opening salvo of this undeclared war was their complicity, as co-conspirators, with the Obama administration in the egregious Russian collusion hoax.  Followed by endless falsehoods, unproven allegations, and character assassination directed at Trump, his family, and members of his administration.

While it has long been a subject of debate, it is now an unquestioned fact that the legacy media, by throwing away any pretense of objectivity, has overtly and unabashedly allied itself with the dominant wing of the Democrat party—the Marxists/socialists.  The George Floyd inspired riots in the spring of 2020 awakened many Americans to the reality the current legacy media will not honestly report on or criticize any Democrat or avowed militant Marxist organizations such as Antifa or Black Lives Matter.

Also in 2020, it became evident that the legacy media had no reluctance in fomenting unfounded fear and anxiety after their deliberate malfeasance in covering the coronavirus pandemic.  They unquestioningly promoted and regurgitated the pronouncements of the agenda-driven federal medical bureaucracy, ignored or buried any opposing viewpoints, and fanned the flames of collective hysteria.  All to make certain that Trump would be defeated in the 2020 election.

This same media cabal also worked hand in glove with Democrat party operatives to: a) promote mass mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, b) obfuscate Democrat voter fraud and manipulation,  and c) white-wash the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The legacy media has also been the primary promoters and cheerleaders of the unconstitutional lawfare being directed at Trump, and many average Americans, including those who have been caught up in the unjustifiable web of January 6th prosecutions by the Biden Justice Department.  There has been no effort to offer any fair and balanced reporting.

The overt concealing of Biden’s accelerating mental frailty and their tacit promotion of assassinating Donald Trump has eventuated in a vast majority of Americans believing that since the agenda-driven legacy media is incapable of any honest reporting, they are principally responsible for the current state of the nation.

Because of the legacy media’s incestuous relationship with the Democrat party and determination to destroy one person, they have fallen off the edge of the precipice and past the point of no return.