I’m grateful today for courage. Not mine, but the courage of the many voices being raised in the independent news and opinion sphere about the recklessly biased coverage of the two presumptive candidates for president this coming November. Once again, mainstream media is following the lead of rightwing so-called ‘news’ like Fox propaganda, by trumpeting the grandiose theatrics of the former narcissist-in-chief while ignoring his daily distortions, lies, and cognitive failures; at the same time, pouncing like a starving cat on a single mixup by an accomplished and proven statesman who cares more about Americans than about his own ego, and more about the planet than his own profit.

The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other infotainment outlets, won the 2016 election for Trump with their free nonstop promotions, and seem on track to do the same thing again in 2024. Their recent egregiously skewed coverage of the biased Hur report and their relentless attacks on President Biden for his age and occasional mistakes is unfathomable. I can’t say anything about it nearly as well as courageous writers like Robert Hubbell in Today’s Edition:

“Perhaps voters don’t question Trump’s sharpness despite more frequent and serious misstatements because the NYTimes devotes an inordinate amount of coverage to Biden’s missteps but hardly mentions Trump’s. The Times creates the dominant narrative and then claims it doesn’t have to report on the counter-narrative because voters aren’t interested in it! What arrogance!

Within the 24-hour window of the NYTimes raking Biden over the coals, the following Republicans misspoke but the Times reacted with indifference:

• “An hour after Biden says the President of Egypt is the President of Mexico Trump says the Prime Minister of Hungary, [Viktor Orban] is the President of Turkey”—a repeated mistake by Trump on the campaign trail.
• Speaker Mike Johnson confused the countries of Iran and Israel in an interview on Fox News, saying that the US has already “funded Iran” in the existing US budget—a mistake viewed as slanderous by the tens of millions of citizens in both countries.
• Fox News infotainer posing as a journalist Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as the “South Carolina Governor.”

Another daily voice for sanity is Jessica Craven, who shared in her newsletter yesterday her letter to the NYT editorial board. A bonus with her newsletter is a weekly dose of good news which celebrates political, environmental, and social justice victories in the previous week, of which there are many. Here’s an excerpt of her letter to the Times:

“What can the New York Times be thinking? Trump shows clear signs of cognitive impairment. You regularly give him a pass. President Biden is considered by all who’ve interacted with him—including his political enemies—to be sharp and capable. The Hur report was written by a former Trump associate; it was a political hit piece and the Times bought into it with zero journalistic scrutiny. 

I have to ask again, do your editors WANT a Trump presidency? Because that’s what your misleading, biased, and hysterically one-sided coverage will bring us. 

History will not be kind to the Times for its relentless attacks on the one man capable of saving us from dictatorship. Shame on you.”

If you feel discouraged by the media narratives that are shaping the opinions of Americans, then take some action to shape the media narratives. Write to the papers or networks you follow, share your outrage on social media, use your right to free speech, and speak truth not only to power but to the media that seems to control it. Join one of the thousands of grassroots political organizations that sprang up during the Trump regime to fight his agenda of power and tax cuts for the wealthy, stepping up the rape of the planet, racism, antisemitism, white male supremacy, and oppression of minorities of all kinds. Subscribe to Hubbell’s and Craven’s newsletters, they tell us how to fight this fight every single day. If we don’t beat Trump at the ballot box in November or legitimately stop his campaign before that, we are in for a worse nightmare than you can imagine.

But as Hubbell often says, we’ve beaten him and his agenda in almost every election since 2016, from special elections to midterms and the 2020 presidential election; we can do it again. “We have every reason to be hopeful, but no reason to be complacent!”