POLITICAL BIAS OF NEWS REPORTING
Using my 18th birthdate as a starting point, I have attentively been following national and international politics for the past 47 years. First as a college student, followed by working at the CIA for thirty years and finally as a college professor for thirteen years, teaching courses on national security. And I sadly offer the observation that the political reporting by the overwhelming majority of major print and electronic media “journalists” since the last presidential election has been the most biased I’ve ever seen over those nearly five decades. The anti-Trump hyperbole by Democratic Party leaders and Congressional members is understandable – the losing side always complains. They chose as a presidential candidate perhaps the only Democratic figure who could have lost to Donald Trump, and the election results also gave the Republicans control of both houses of Congress. It couldn’t be that the American voters actually chose Republican candidates and view points; Vladimir Putin interfered and stole the election. However, journalists have always staked a claim to being the impartial observers and purveyors of truth to the American public. I’m sure they even teach that motto in most schools of journalism and they do have a section of newspapers called “editorials” where the personal views of journalists are supposed to remain.
While I haven’t been keeping an exact tally since last November 5th of every major reporting outlet, I’ve certainly had the clear impression that any interpretation of “facts” in news stories that managed to criticize President Trump personally or his policies, has been pretty much the standard approach to news coverage, certainly by the Washington Post, the NY Times and CNN, just to name a few. The current excitement about what President Trump recently told Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and the firing of FBI Director Comey has reached an absurd level of such selective reporting of “facts”, I was actually motivated to write this editorial. (Not that any major news outlet will actually carry it.) Before getting in to specifics about those two issues, I will also say that my view of the farce of “objective reporting” has also had in the last few days a personal experience.
Early on the morning of Tuesday, May 16th, I received an email from Nyja Greene, stating her title as CNN Editorial Producer, Newsroom w/ John Berman and Poppy Harlow, asking if I was available for a brief one-on-one interview for that show. “Topic will be Trump-Russia-Intelligence Leak.” Granted, I clearly hadn’t been her first choice of the day, as it was only an hour until the show went on the air. Ms. Greene had obviously had to dip deep into the CNN digital rolodex to find my name, presumably from when I had been interviewed on CNN (and several other news outlets in different countries) several years earlier. I was driving on an interstate at the time, and responded that I was quite literally, physically not available that morning. Ms. Greene replied and asked if I might be available on Wednesday or Thursday. After several more emails, it was agreed that Wednesday morning, during the 10:00 am segment of her two hour news show would work and CNN went ahead and sent an official request to Indiana University to use the broadcast studio of the School of Global and International Studies for my end of the interview.
I did think it a bit telling that she had referred to President Trump giving classified intelligence to the Russian foreign minister as a “leak” (as was the chosen word I later in the day saw was being used in a number of news articles online). I would learn less than 24 hours later, just how telling the choice of that word was. In a late Tuesday evening exchange with Ms. Greene, I was asked what my general thoughts on those two topics were. This had occurred several times before with various networks; apparently, at least in the past, so that the staff could prepare intelligent-sounding questions for use by the on-screen moderator. Shortly before 7:00 am on Wednesday, Ms. Greene left me a voice message and sent me a brief email informing me that due to a scheduling shift, I was no longer needed to be interviewed. I’d gone from being wanted on either Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, to not being needed at all. Quite a coincidence that after CNN learned that I wasn’t going to use by background as a former CIA officer, Russian “expert” and college professor to bash President Trump as a suspect Russian agent, etc., I was no longer needed for a five-six minute interview.
Perhaps, CNN had indeed suddenly found more well-known individuals to have on their show in the coming days, but just maybe, their problem was that I didn’t have the “political views” that CNN was looking for to fit its biased opinion of President Trump. Just for the record, what I had basically told Greene was that a) it was a perfectly legal action by President Trump to provide USG classified information to any foreign government he wished, as had every president for decades before him; and b) if FBI Director Comey had felt back in January that President Trump had improperly tried to pressure him to drop the Flynn investigation, why hadn’t Comey immediately gone to the Office of the Attorney-General, or at a minimum, to the general counsel of the FBI and reported a possible obstruction of justice attempt? By only putting on the air “experts” who have the “correct” views is hardly objective reporting.
CNN is not the only news media to push a biased political view of these events, as factual reporting. Many major news organizations have conveniently skipped over the legality of Trump’s actions of passing allegedly classified counterterrorism information to the Russian Government. Many have also reported as a “fact” that based on Comey’s memo for his personal file, with his view/interpretation of what was said at the meeting with the president several months back, that President Trump could now be charged with obstruction of justice and impeached. A memo that had to date not actually been seen by any news organization, or the question of its accuracy. Being a “journalist” in America brings with it a number of privileges, such as conveniently being immune from prosecution for receiving and publishing classified government documents. There are also supposed to be certain responsibilities, such as factually and objectively reporting to the public political events. Sadly, a great many very liberal-minded journalists and news organizations have forgotten about that latter responsibility. They do a great disservice to the American public. I’m about to the point of not even watching TV “news” or reading political reporting in newspapers.