Say what you will about former President Jimmy Carter, he has never shied away from confronting what he believes are unpleasant truths. Thus he earns an Ethics Hero designation by telling New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd;

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about. I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”

Hilariously, USA Today immediately proved Carter’s point by writing, in its naturally objective and fair story on the quote,

“Perhaps Carter is seeking to placate Trump as part of a job interview: The 93-year-old former president said he is willing to undertake a diplomatic mission to North Korea to discuss its nuclear weapons program.”

In a related and illuminating story, former NPR CEO Ken Stern, nine years after he left the taxpayer- funded radio news network, has suddenly realized that there may be some liberal bias in the news media! His op-ed for the New York Post begins,

“Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.”

Gee, that’s kind of nice. What we usually hear from reporters, editors and media management is that the accusation of partisan bias, based on such overwhelming evidence that it makes a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard look like a breeze, is just a Fox News myth, a conservative concoction and a false talking point. It would have been more nice, of course, if Ken Stern had come to this obvious conclusion and used his position to do something, rather than wait nine years and speak up when the average informed person reads his name on an article and thinks, “Who the hell is Ken Stern”?

I confess, I detest these too little, too late confessions of enlightenment, which are usually self-serving. I smell a book and an interview tour, don’t you?

Well, I won’t be reading it. Later in his conveniently tardy piece, Stern writes,

“…my new friends in Youngstown, Ohio, and Pikeville, Ky., see media as hopelessly disconnected from their lives, and it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias.

The mainstream media is constantly under attack by the president. They are “frankly disgusting,” “tremendously dishonest,” “failing,” “they make up the stories” and are now threatened with loss of broadcast licenses if they continue to author “fake news.” And that is just a random Wednesday’s worth of words from Donald Trump.

Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combating, our growing partisan divide.

Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.

None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government. At the same time, the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America.”

True to Stern’s  NPR and partisan biased media roots, this is disingenuous, self-contradictory double talk:

• “it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias” is deceit. Based on what Stern already wrote and what any fair observer, including Jimmy Carter—hardly a conservative shill—has to concede, the news media hasn’t “opened the door to charges of bias,” it is biased.

Stern is engaging in equivocation and intentionally leading readers away from the truth rather than toward it….just like NPR too much of the time.

• “[The news media is] “frankly disgusting,” “tremendously dishonest,” “failing,” “they make up the stories” and are now threatened with loss of broadcast licenses if they continue to author “fake news.” And that is just a random Wednesday’s worth of words from Donald Trump.”

Those descriptions are correct. What Stern had already described before he retreated to Trump-bashing shows that Trump is correct. For some strange reason, Stern and the few news media types that admit bias seem to think that misleading the public, pushing an ideological agenda and favoring one party over the other by manipulating news reports isn’t disgusting and dishonest. It is. Adding the President’s ridiculous and ignorant threat to pull broadcast licenses to the accurate complaints is a typical news media trick, discrediting the truth by associating it with nonsense.

• “Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. “

a) Shouldn’t everyone take pleasure in the discomfort of the media to have its abdication of its duty to the public exposed?

b) The critical role of the “press” as an independent force to permit the orderly functioning of democracy requires the press to be independent, and not allied with a political agenda.  When the news media rejects that ideal, as the current news media has, then the past reverence for that ideal is irrelevant.

• “We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combating, our growing partisan divide.”

Liek the President, the 65% are right.  Stern is falling back on the news media’s conveniently narrow definition of “fake news” as made up facts and stories intended to deceive. Ethics Alarms uses a more useful definition (as progressives howl): news stories that mislead readers and distort facts due to reporter bias, incompetence, or malice. The issue is trust. 65% of the public is saying that it doesn’t trust the news media, and Stern, before he started spinning, told us why they can’t and shouldn’t.

• “Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.”

What an astounding sentence! ‘If media institutions weren’t so untrustworthy, those demagogues saying they are untrustworthy wouldn’t be so effective at convincing the public that they are untrustworthy.’  Damn demagogues!

• “None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government. At the same time, the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America.”

Of course it justifies Trump’s attacks. The news media is abusing and betraying its vital role in our democracy by slanting its news coverage to undermine a duly elected President’s leadership. The President’s job is to protect the Constitution, and a press that uses its immunity from oversight to subvert democracy by engaging in disinformation is a threat to the Constitution. It would be better if other institutions made the President’s intervention unnecessary, but those institutions, like academia, are partisan and corrupt as well.

I have condemned President Trump for punching down, which is an abuse of his power. Exposing the partisan bias and lack of independence and objectivity in the news media isn’t punching down. The news media has nothing to fear from a President. What it should fear, and must fear, is the public’s distrust when it ceases to do its duty. Somebody has to make the public aware that it is being betrayed by its institutions, and when the viability of our democracy, which depends on an informed populace, is being threatened. If nobody else will warn them, the job falls to the President.

• And this final “yechh!”: “the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America.”

What??? The news media doesn’t have “a part of America,” and if journalists think that way, they are untrustworthy and incompetent by definition. Stern is using a cover-phrase to obscure what he is really saying. “Reflecting only their part of America” means slanting news coverage according to partisan agendas and bias. That’s not a “failing.” That’s “not practicing journalism, but propaganda instead.”