The collapse of fair-minded journalism.

• Author: Goodwin, Michael
• Position: Mass Media

"[Pres. Donald] Trump [is] savaged like no other [chief executive] in memory. We [are] witnessing the total collapse of journalistic standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story [is] an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion [runs] in the same direction ... away from Trump."

I have been a journalist for a long time--long enough to know that it was not always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We generally were seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year's election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale--that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it--not even close.

It is not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up at The New York Times, so I am familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government--and far more exciting and glamorous; think Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That is because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.

During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." I am not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help--or, as liberals like to say, "Government is what we do together." From there, it is a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.

The rest of that journalistic ethos--"afflict the comfortable"--leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He or she also will give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign, but I still was shocked at what happened. This was not naive liberalism run amok. This was a whole new approach to politics. No one in modern times had seen anything like it. As with grief, there were several stages. In the beginning, Donald Trump's candidacy was treated as an outlandish publicity stunt, as though he was not a serious candidate and should be treated as a circus act, but television executives quickly made a surprising discovery: the more they put Trump on the air, the...