Some of the most powerful newsrooms in the country clearly see President Trump as the enemy, according to former longtime ABC News anchor Ted Koppel.
It’s right there in their coverage, he explained this month during an interview with Marvin Kalb at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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“I’m terribly concerned that when you talk about the New York Times these days, when you talk about the Washington Post these days, we’re not talking about the New York Times of 50 years ago. We are not talking about the Washington Post of 50 years ago,” the former “Nightline” anchor said. “We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States.”
“We have things appearing on the front page of the New York Times right now that never would have appeared 50 years ago. Analysis, commentary on the front page,” he added.
That’s quite a thing for someone in the news media “family” to allege. Huge, in fact.
“So [Trump’s] perception that the establishment press is out to get him doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done. It is. But the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco — he’s not mistaken in that perception and he’s not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, described themselves as belonging to the Resistance,” Koppel continued.
He added, “What does that mean? That’s not said by people who consider themselves reporters, objective reporters of facts. That’s the kind of language that’s used by people who genuinely believe, and I rather suspect with some justification, that Donald Trump is bad for the United States and they’re betting that the sooner he’s out of office the better they will like it. Whether that happens by virtue of indictment, impeachment or election, we’ll see. … We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were.”
Almost as interesting as the comments themselves is the fact that this interview took place on March 7, and practically no one (myself included) heard anything about it until this week.
It took a conservative media watchdog group, NewsBusters, hunting down the interview for it to come to light. Since then, major newsrooms, including the Washington Post, Fox News, and Poynter, have reported on Koppel’s remarks. That’s an awfully curious thing, considering there’s usually no shortage of immediate news coverage for the various musings of retired journalists.
Until this morning, I knew more about what disgraced former news anchor Dan Rather, who CNN laughably characterizes as an “iconic broadcaster,” had to say last weekend about the president and propaganda than I knew about what Koppel had to say much earlier this month about major newsrooms’ obvious headlong descent into anti-Trumpist ideology.
Just an oversight, I’m sure.
