Opinion: Press refuses to celebrate Trump's victories

Mainstream media outlets are so busy concocting elaborate conspiracy theories about President Trump that they won’t even acknowledge when he scores victories for the American people.

Outrageous mischaracterization of President Trump’s policies, initiatives, decisions, and remarks began the moment he declared his candidacy for President. It has only intensified since.

Since taking office, the President’s astonishing achievements through peace-and-prosperity policies have come at record pace, yet the news media go out of their way to ignore them, deny them, or deceive the public about them.

Worse still, stories and scandals are fabricated without even the pretense - let alone the identities - of legitimate sources.

Call it errors-and-omissions reporting - or call it campaigning - because it sure isn’t ethical journalism.

The most prominent example of media bias is the obsession with the Russia “scandal.” This story dominates almost every news outlet in America, even though there is still little evidence of any collusion with the Kremlin.

The media are so desperate to advance their narrative that they didn’t even balk at reporting on a 35-page dossier full of unverified information commissioned by a political opposition research firm funded by then-candidate Trump’s opponent.

And whenever the relentless “collusion” coverage becomes too eye-rollingly tedious and absurd, the media have another favorite tactic: smearing the President as a “racist.” 

Usually, this involves distorting President Trump’s immigration policies by misrepresenting legitimate concerns about border security as hateful rhetoric. When President Trump justifiably called MS-13 gang members “animals,” for instance, the media falsely claimed that he was describing all illegal immigrants. It’s sickening incitement by the media and toxic to our society.

Equally duplicitous and corrosive is the collective decision by media outlets to ignore truly phenomenal news coming from the Trump administration. 

In just two years, President Trump’s policies have produced historic economic achievements, improving the lives of millions of Americans, including minorities left behind by previous administrations. GDP growth is above 3 percent for the first time since before the Great Recession; unemployment is at a 50-year low.

To the mainstream press, however, these types of stories rarely qualify as “news.” In an editorial earlier this year, Investor's Business Daily boldly slammed the media’s skewed coverage of the economy, highlighting major unemployment drops for Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians that have gone almost entirely unreported.

“More significantly, the jobless rate for African Americans fell to a record low 6.8 percent in December [2017] from 7.2 percent the month before. And it was the first time ever that unemployment for African Americans ever fell below 7 percent,” the publication wrote.

“What's interesting is that [the unemployment trend] is completely contrary to the reigning orthodoxy among leftist pundits and the media: That Donald Trump and his economic policies embody a kind of racism intended to keep minorities down,” the editorial concluded.

Then there’s the refusal of the mainstream media to cover positive news about President Trump’s national security and international relations successes

While the press fawned over the disastrous foreign policy of President Obama, President Trump’s groundbreaking strides to secure peace in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East are met with journalistic sneers or apathy. Even when the president scheduled a historic summit with Kim Jong Un to negotiate North Korea’s denuclearization, many political pundits and talking heads struck a critical tone.  

“Presidents meeting with #KJU exposed incredible hypocrisy of many in media,” Senator Marco Rubio tweeted at the time. “When Obama did these things, he was described as enlightened. When Trump does it he is reckless & foolish. 1 yr ago they attacked Trump for leading us towards war, now attack for being too quick for peace.”

The mendacity of the mainstream press has consequences to our democracy and civil discourse. By refusing to accurately cover the President, by being relentlessly hostile and disingenuous, the media mislead the public and violate a sacred trust. They also undermine their own reputations. 

They try to blame President Trump, but the media’s obvious political agenda is why the nickname “fake news” has been embraced by millions of Americans who are sick and tired of journalistic malpractice and who fear that the media are harming our nation.

By undermining the legitimacy of the 2016 election through non-stop promotion of fake “collusion,” ignoring the Trump administration’s policy successes, and using “news” reports to craft a narrative favorable to the Democrat agenda, the press is playing an active role as political propagandists seeking to impact our political process.

Jeff Ballabon is a political advisor, media consultant, and former CBS executive.