Conservative media mogul Mark Levin is calling for a national debate on the liberal advocacy and bias of much of the media, a growing trend propelled by the election of President Trump that he fears threatens the nation.
With his highly anticipated book, “Unfreedom of the Press,” the No. 4 best-seller on Amazon even before its May 21 release, and a planned promotional blitz, the top-rated radio and TV host plans to call out the media’s “army of haters” and urge the public to demand less liberal bias and opinion in the news.
“We have to have a national discussion about this, not with the media, but among ourselves like our founders did, in our homes, our restaurants, in our churches, in our civic groups, at a grassroots level, about what we’re going to do about it, because if we don’t have a free press we cannot sustain our republic,” he told Secrets this week.
Speaking in his Levin TV offices, he said much of the media has given up fairness to take out Trump by any means necessary, including fake and “pseudo” news. “What’s going on today with these attacks on the president of the United States, literally trying to burden him to such an extent that he cannot function, undermines the republic,” said Levin.
“Unfreedom of the Press” is unlike Levin’s recent series of books on liberty and the Constitution, and touches on one of his favorite topics for his nightly radio Mark Levin Show: the media’s liberal bias.
Over 258-pages, he uses history, authoritative studies from organizations such as Harvard University, and admissions from prominent journalists to prove the mass media as leftist and proud of it. He lists dozens of comments, for example, of anti-Trump statements from journalists.
He also takes on the vast swath of reporters and organizations who claim that Trump is the greatest threat to journalism ever. While Trump has often stated that the media is the “enemy of the people,” Levin said the president has done little beyond rhetoric to squeeze the media.
CNN’s Jim Acosta lying again https://t.co/QbZrNa0hRn
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) May 16, 2019
By comparison, he cites historical examples of how presidents from John Adams to Barack Obama prosecuted reporters and limited access, much of which was ignored in the liberal newspapers.
The reason, he wrote, is because the Democratic Party and media are in bed. He cited 29 recent examples of media figures going to work for Democrats and party officials joining the media, huge by comparison to the GOP-media revolving door.
“There is a relative handful of media outlets that are trying to balance how they report,” he said of conservative outlets, “and most of them come under attack from the 98% who demand uniformity.”
In that 98% group, he said in the interview, “There’s this constant movement between the Democrat Party and the media, and the media and the Democrat Party, there are family members, there’s incestuous relationships.”
His book cited a report that showed political reporters live in counties Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 presidential election. Another quoted study found that 430 media members gave $382,000 to Clinton.
In trademark style, Levin spares none of his targets, and even devotes a chapter to ripping the New York Times, the crown jewel of media, for its reluctance to focus on the Holocaust during World War II.
His goal is not to destroy the liberal press but to nudge it away from being one-sided and driven to promote progressives and their policies.
“If newsrooms and journalists do not act forthwith and with urgency to ‘fundamentally transform’ their approach to journalism, which, sadly, is highly unlikely, their credibility will continue to erode and may well reach a point soon where it is irreparably damaged with a large portion of the citizenry, and rightly so,” he penned.
He concluded, “The media will not only marginalize themselves but they will continue to be the greatest threat to freedom of the press today — not President Trump or his administration, but the current practitioners of what used to be journalism.”
