The mainstream media has become so biased in recent years that President Donald Trump popularized the phrase “fake news” and Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, posts rants about them almost daily on his X platform. Both have sued the media for libel or defamation. But little has changed; outside of some pushback at a few publications like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times due to their publishers, the mainstream media is doubling down with the slant and partisan bias against Trump and conservatives, further decimating their shrinking numbers.
As I’ve written about extensively, the AP Stylebook Orwellianly dictates what words and phrases mainstream journalists must use, such as “election denier” and “insurrection” to refer to J6, so there is no way around that built-in bias. Mainstream journalists are required to follow that style, and even the few newspapers like The New York Times which have their own style guides mostly copy the AP Stylebook.
Another way the bias is built in is due to their funding structure. There is a perception that news makes money from subscriptions and advertising — but a primary source of the money actually comes from wealthy partisan nonprofits. The far left Arabella Advisors is a key funder of the mainstream media, especially the most partisan sites. Not surprisingly, left-wing billionaire George Soros funds many of them. Much of the money from Soros and others like him is funneled through an organization first called States Newsroom, which then passes it on to these sites. The Capital Research Center has done some incredibleresearch into this organization’s dark money network.
If journalists dare to write articles that show any semblance of respect for the right, they risk having the funding pulled. The transition from print newspapers and magazines to the internet has forced news organizations to become more heavily dependent on this type of funding, since subscriptions and advertising have not kept up pace with the level they were when print newspapers were prevalent. With the journalism industry now shrunk to almost half of its size in the mid-2000s, and reporters making much smaller paychecks with fewer benefits, they are even less likely to buck the traditional left-leaning line.
Considering how much big tech censors conservative information now, why would an average mainstream journalist want to spend the extra time trying to dig up the conservative side for an article? Thankfully, the emergence of the Luxxle search engine has evened the playing field a little, even offering a right-leaning only search function.
The Trump administration’s DOGE led by Musk conducted an investigation into USAID funding and found that lots of money was going to left-leaning mainstream media organizations. Most notably, the federal government was spending millions on subscriptions to outlets like the AP, Reuters andPolitico. Politico alone received $8.2 million from the federal government. With federal agencies dominated by deep state leftists, it created yet another incentive for journalists to skew their coverage in order to ensure continued funding. The Trump administration said the payments will be canceled.
Another problem created by the transition to the internet is the need to get clicks, which drives racier and racier writing. Before, revenue was pretty stable from subscriptions and advertising, not dependent on views. Now, many news sites have policies about how many views journalists need to get on their articles. The most partisan articles generate the most attention; their Democratic base eats them up. The partisan fake “fact checking” no doubt grew out of this; basically an easy lazy way to state that “Trump lied” or similar outrageous sounding headline.
Journalists always had to cozy up to elected officials in order to get the best access, but with Democrats increasingly dominating offices in large cities — which is where most of the mainstream media is located — this fawning has become worse than ever.
Studies show that only about 3 percent of journalists are Republican, the smallest number ever. Driving some of this is the indoctrination in college, with professors also now overwhelmingly on the left. Charismatic journalism professors charm their young impressionable students, creating this fake ivory tower impression of what the job is like. In reality, being a journalist is no walk in the park — a few years ago it was reported that New York Timesreporters make the same pay as an airline flight attendant. Several of my journalist friends don’t even get paid, it’s become so difficult to find a decent paying job in the industry. Instead, they’re told to pay a PR firm to place their article in a publication somewhere.
There’s a revolving door between Democrats in office and partisan journalists. No one thinks anything of it anymore when George Stephanopoulos leaves the Clinton administration to work for ABC, or Jen Psaki leaves the Biden administration to work for MSNBC. And they may likely return to work in the next Democratic administration.
Fortunately, conservative watchdog organizations like the Media Research Center, Accuracy in Media and NewsCartels are keeping close tabs on the ongoing bias. AI is advancing quickly, and soon many of these biased journalists will find themselves out of a job. Go to Grok and tell it to generate an article about Trump’s plans to fix the border. You can even tell it to generate the article in the style of some writer you prefer. With information overload, even the unique types of stories that only a human could do (for now), such as interviewing a politician, aren’t so necessary since people will have so many other interesting articles thrown at them that they won’t realize what they’re missing.