Intro to Journalism 2016

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In his letter to Donald J. Trump, New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick said, “Congratulations on a tremendous campaign. You have dealt with an unbelievable slanted and negative media and have come out beautifully.”

Belichick is not alone. Poll after poll has confirmed that the American people understand and recognize the problem of liberal media bias. In fact, the bias is just one aspect of the corruption that surrounds us and infects the government.

A Quinnipiac University poll found that 55 percent of voters told pollsters that Trump was right when he charged the media were biased against him. An Associated Press-GfK poll found that “Overall, 56 percent of likely voters say the media is biased against Trump…”

One cannot say with certainty that the media bias in the 2016 campaign was worse than, say, the elections of 2008 or 2012. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton enjoyed extraordinary media bias in their favor. One difference this time around is that the media bias has been extremely well-documented by the emails released from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. We have seen the evidence of how the collusion and collaboration occur. The evidence shows that “journalists” work secretly with one major political party, the Democrats, against conservatives and Republicans.

Needless to say, all of this is a blatant violation of the ethical standards that journalists profess to uphold.

The preamble of the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists says they “believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.”

Instead, they have compromised their integrity in order to elect a woman whose record as a security risk should make her ineligible to seek the presidency.

But it’s worse than being unethical.

We see in one of the emails that Washington Post “journalist” Dana Milbank was in touch with the Democrats about crafting one of his anti-Trump columns.

This email proves that Milbank has been functioning as an operative of the Democratic Party. Of course, those of us who have watched his appearances at conservative events over the years had suspected what was going on. Now we have the proof of the actual collaboration. The email portrays help for Milbank as a “research request” from the columnist.

In other words, he couldn’t even write his own columns. He was lazy and liberal.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. This blog is excerpted from a column which he wrote for Accuracy in Media.