Before you start throwing the First Amendment at me, I’m not suggesting even a scintilla of curtailment of the media’s ability to print and to broadcast whatever it wants. I do, however, believe it is past time to shine the brightest light possible on the media’s massive bias that heavily favors the Democrats/Left in elections. As Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “Sunlight was the best disinfectant.” Voters need and deserve 100% transparency when it comes to how much the media aids the Left in elections so they can properly weigh what they read and hear on a daily basis from the media. Equally important, the media must be held accountable for what it does to tilt elections in the Left’s favor. Finally, Democrat campaign finance reports must reflect the utterly ginormous in-kind contributions the media make to their efforts year-in and year-out.
Let me explain how I propose a Trump Administration accomplishes this vital task.
First, to repeat, this program will not limit what the media does substantively. It can continue to write and to broadcast whatever it wants in the manner it deems best. This program merely will identify when bias has occurred in favor of one candidate against his or her opponent. Any in-kind contributions determined to have occurred also won’t impact the finances of media entities. The only change will be when a media entity is found to have made an in-kind contribution to a candidate, it will have to issue a report at the end of the year noting that in-kind contribution. This report will allow media watchdogs to analyze and rate media outlets on their bias.
Next, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) will oversee a panel made up of five adjudicators appointed by the President who serve fixed terms. That board will receive complaints on a daily basis in which media bias is alleged. The board will have 24-hours to review the complaint and issue a finding that an in-kind contribution occurred or not. The complainant and the media entity involved can appeal the panel’s finding to the FEC, which will have 24-hours to sustain or reverse the panel’s finding. Once this process is complete and a finding of bias is made, both the media entity and the candidate who received the in-kind contribution will be required to note the in-kind contribution on the next required filings. All complaints, panel findings, appeals, and FEC actions will be publicly available within six hours of being produced so candidates and voters get information about media bias in as close to real-time as possible.
Finally, at the end of the calendar year, the FEC will issue a report detailing all of the complaints made in that year and issue a "bias ranking” to each media entity found to have made an in-kind contribution. This annual report will provide voters with a clear summary of which media entities consistently engage in bias and which don’t. One presumes it also will impact which broadcasts and publications Americans watch or subscribe to. That reality alone will serve as a strong incentive for media entities to curb their biases.
For too long, the media has been free to engage in bias against Republicans and the Right without experiencing any real consequences. A program as described above (or one like it) will substantially increase transparency and accountability over the media. Here are just a few recent examples showing how rampant media bias is in America.
At a White House press briefing on Tuesday, a reporter actually made this statement in reference to Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump in a Twitter livestream: "What role does the White House or the president have in sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of intervening in that? Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but, you know, it’s a wider thing, right?,” asked The Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson, Jr..
Here is how CBS News covered Trump’s proposal to stop taxing tips compared to Kamala Harris’s stealing that idea as her own after serving as the tie-breaking vote on the Biden-Harris Administration’s legislation to increase the Internal Revenue Service’s ability to tax tips (among other actions).
See Time Magazine’s two different covers of Trump and Harris. Notice the different?
See the various media outlet’s coverage of the Musk livestream with Trump.
These five examples of bias all occurred within the last few days, so imagine the volume of biases generated by the media every day against the Right in America. To be clear, you rarely, if ever, see media bias against Democrats in favor of Republicans. Media bias always goes in one direction. That bias equates to an in-kind contribution that should be documented and publicized.
On media bias, Former Bush Administration Press Secretary Ari Fleischer noted yesterday on Twitter:
The American people haven’t changed much over the last 20 years, but the press has. The press used to hold powerful people to account. Now, their calling is to defeat Trump, which means they prop up Harris, a candidate who shuns them, has changed almost all her positions, and is not capable of speaking without a strict script. The failure of the press to do its job is one of the biggest issues of our time. One of the reasons our country is divided is because the press takes sides and has preferences. They are not society’s neutral truth tellers. That’s why most reporters are drooling over Kamala and doing everything in their power to boost her. If and when she does take questions, they’ll mostly be softballs and silly horse race questions. Republicans have to work twice as hard as Democrats to win. Republicans have to defeat their opponents AND overcome a hostile media. That’s the way it is.
We’re now three weeks from the press hounding Biden out of the race because they looked like fools for defending years of video clips showing him stumbling around on the international stage non compos mentis. And with no remorse or self-awareness, the media are already back to doing everything they can to serve Democrats’ narrative.
What this means in practice is that, unlike a traditional presidential campaign, there’s been virtually no discussion of actual issues such as the economy, immigration, education, taxes, health care, foreign policy, and so on. The last four years have been pretty disastrous. As a result, if this campaign becomes about issues and what’s happened under the Biden-Harris presidency, Trump is going to benefit greatly from that discussion. So the press won’t let it happen.
Kamala Harris could not survive the scrutiny of a real presidential campaign, and the media know this. They figure they can skate by with three months of embarrassingly puffy coverage and fool just enough voters with the talk of “vibes” and “joyful” campaigning, because vibes are all the Harris campaign has. The Harris-Walz record is indefensible. There’s a reason their website has seven donation buttons, but no webpage dedicated to issues.
Media bias is real and a very bright spotlight must be focused on it if America is ever to see it reform itself to being a fair, impartial, and unbiased source of information for Americans. As Voltaire said, "With great power comes great responsibility." For the last fifty years, the U.S. media has been increasingly irresponsible and reckless with its power. One would have hoped that the Russia collusion and Alfa Bank hoaxes, as well as the Charlottesville and suckers/losers lies, would have generated some introspection and reform within the media. Those media failures did not. They kept their erroneously awarded prizes and moved on to the next bulldung story to use to hurt the Right and help the Left.
As I detailed in my second book, “Taxpayers Don’t Stand a Chance,” media bias isn’t just a national media problem and doesn’t just impact political races. Media bias benefits left-leaning organizations and hurts right-leaning organizations. The media’s attack on The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is just the latest example. Click on this link to read the chapter from my book, “JINOs (Journalist In Name Only).”
Imagine how few elections the Left would win if the media wasn’t in the tank for them obscuring what their policies and positions really are. Media bias also permeates our K-12 and higher education systems so that our kids are fed a daily diet of disinformation and misinformation masked as news. Without a program as described above, the media won’t change and America will continue to slide into the totalitarian nightmare envisioned by George Orwell in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World."
P.S. It increasingly looks like one legacy of the Biden-Harris Administration will be a theocratic Iran that possesses nuclear weapons. Trump had put the Iranian mullahs in a box for four years, but Biden-Harris let them back out. Brilliant work Biden, Harris, Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and 81,000,000 voters.
