There was a time before President Trump triggered the mainstream media hacks into wearing their hammer and sickle biased hearts on their sleeves that I’m almost wistful for these days. I’ve been writing professionally about media bias for over 20 years now, and I miss the days when I used to have to put more effort into pointing out the bias.
These days, all I have to do is point.
In a world of rapid, often unpleasant, changes, I was almost delighted to catch a whiff of old-school bias in Wednesday’s New York Times Opinion section. OK, the headline was another fainting couch affair, but it’s probably in the contract of every NYT editor that some sort of implied apocalypse be included when writing about conservatives. The column is titled. “They Were Supposed to Save Europe. Instead, They’re Condemning It to Horrors.”
Here’s the opening to the piece, which hits the throwback bias notes:
About a decade ago, a wave of populism crashed across Europe. Reeling from the financial crisis, voters flirted with risky alternatives to mainstream parties, threatening tumult in the continent’s usually stable politics. It was an unsettling time for Europe’s leaders. But pundits assured them that the risk of a far-right takeover was overblown. Robust electoral systems, not-so-distant memories of dictatorships and weak support among wealthier voters, they believed, put hard ceilings on the insurgents’ support.
Today it’s clear their confidence was mistaken. Far-right parties have kept piling on votes, established themselves in European institutions, reversed key tenets of the green transition and forced tougher border policies. They rule in Hungary and Italy and will soon in the Czech Republic; even in historically social-democratic Finland and Sweden, conservative leaders rely on their support. They have a cheerleader in the Oval Office and another atop X.
Worse may be still to come. In Europe’s leading economies, centrist governments are failing badly.
Speaking of contracts, mine obligates me to respond to this with more than “LOL.”
The olden times approach pioneered by The New York Times involved the incessant repetition of “far-right” when writing about anyone or anything center, or right-of-center on the political spectrum. The most moderate Republicans would occasionally be portrayed as part of the radical right.
In tandem with the incorrect overuse of “far-right” was the complete absence of “far-left” or “leftists” when writing about Democrats. (I know that this particular article is about Europe, but the propagandist tactics from yesteryear are best described in domestic terms. I’ll focus on the Europeans in a moment.) The goal, of course, was to condition people to believe that Democrats and the positions they championed were mainstream, and that all things Republican were out of step with everyday Americans.
Here, the author is laughably making the case that United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a centrist. He’s presiding over a country where a woman was arrested for texting a homophobic slur that she used to describe a man who had brutally assaulted her and put her in the hospital. A country that’s also officially run interference for immigrant rape gangs because it didn’t want to be “Islamophobic.”
Sure, populists who want border control are the problem.
Dangerous open border immigration laxity is only “centrist” to those who are so far left that they’d need Sherpa guides, GPS, and a lot of travel time to get anywhere near the real center. Anyone who advocates for sane border policies is a dangerous, far-right populist who will be visiting “horrors” upon the vestigial and increasingly irrelevant continent.
Starmer is an easy target. Let us now take a look at the darling of American leftists, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is presently advocating that government-approved media outlets be given labels that identify them as “friendly.” The Soviet Union is experiencing quite the revival in countries that were on the good side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
This trip down Media Bias Memory Lane has made me realize that Trump Derangement Syndrome may merely be a mutation of a virus that has been plaguing American journalists for a very, very long time.
Click the button below to get the Morning Briefing emailed to you every weekday. Have your coffee with me, people. It’s free and it supports conservative media!
See Through the Spin — And Fight Back
Tired of the media twisting reality into whatever story fits the narrative of the day? So am I. That’s why I’ve made it my mission to call out the falsehoods, expose the hypocrisy, and bring you commentary and humor that actually makes sense.
As a PJ Media VIP subscriber, you’ll get exclusive access to all my columns, podcasts, and videos—the stuff the media wishes you wouldn’t see.
Right now, you can join at 60% off with the promo code FIGHT.
Because that’s exactly what we’re doing—fighting back.
