Below is my column in Fox.com on the response of media figures to the Trump victory on election night. The meltdown was a moment of honesty for some in revealing the bias harbored by many in the industry. That curtain pull offered a glimpse of the Great Oz that some will be difficult to unsee.
Here is the column:
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” Those words came to mind as leading scientific and media figures lost any semblance of restraint or neutrality in bemoaning the results of the presidential election. After regaining their composure, the public was told to ignore what they had just seen.
It was not surprising that the sweeping Trump victory last week produced near hysteria among some Harris supporters from women pledging to break up with men to others cutting off their hair to those pledging to flee the country (including one curiously announcing that he was “leaving the United States” for Hawaii).
It also may not be such a surprise that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul would label over half of the electorate as “anti-American” for voting for Trump or other Republican politicians. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that we are now officially moving into a dictatorship due to this democratic election.
It is the media elite that was most interesting to watch. Obviously, the response on MSNBC and CNN were expected as figures like contributor Claire McCaskill wept on air.
However, other news organizations like CBS News have long maintained claims of neutrality even as their networks were criticized for openly pushing the Harris-Walz ticket. That included the alleged biased handling of the vice-presidential debate as CBS insisted that its hosts and journalists were completely neutral in the election.
Yet, after the election, there was CBS News anchor John Dickerson getting choked up on national television in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Dickerson chose to go on a show that has been openly anti-Trump for years. Nevertheless, many were surprised that, even days after the election, Dickerson was still overwhelmed by grief.
Colbert asked: “How would you explain that to a 14-year-old today? How would you explain this election?”
“I’ll try not to think about my boys because,” Dickerson started to respond before losing his composure.
It was one thing for these late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel to tear up over the results, but this is one of the top news figures on one of the three top networks.
Thus far there is no backlash at CBS. That is in sharp contrast to the recent controversy involving CBS News host Tony Dokoupil who was immediately criticized by CBS for his criticism of an author for his anti-Israeli views as showing bias. Dokoupil reportedly was pushed into an “emotional meeting” with network staffers upset with his perceived bias in favor of Israel.
So how does CBS feign neutrality when an anchor gets choked up at the thought of a Trump victory? The answer is easy: The public is told to ignore it and trust a journalist who cannot even discuss the election results without fighting back tears.
That message was even more jarring at Scientific American. Once a popular, science-based publication, the magazine has been increasingly criticized for its political slant and pseudoscientific views. Much of the blame has focused on Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief.
After the election, Helmuth had a raving, profanity-laden meltdown on social media.
She called Gen X voters f**king racists”. She dismissed “solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f**k them to the moon and back.” She even added a condemnation to her fellow Indianans as “racist and sexist” for voting for Trump.
The postings dispensed with faux claims of neutrality, and many again raised long-standing concerns over the magazine’s direction. Helmuth responded by deleting the comments and just telling readers to effectively forget she said it.
In fairness, Helmuth was trying to separate her personal views from those as the editor-in-chief. However, her “expression of shock and confusion about the election results” parallels what many have objected to the political turn of the magazine in recent years.
In 2020, Scientific American broke a 175-year tradition of non-partisanship to endorse Joe Biden in the presidential election. Conservatives have complained about the tenor and thrust of the magazine, which was once entirely apolitical.
The point is that Helmuth’s rage is not confined to her social media account.
The public is again being told to ignore the man behind the curtain. However, much of the public has already left.
As I discuss in my recent book, The Indispensable Right, many in the media and journalism schools expressly abandoned both objectivity and neutrality years ago. The result has been a plummeting of revenue and readership as the public turns to new media and other sources for their news.
At the Washington Post, publisher and CEO William Lewis put it bluntly by telling the staff, “Let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Nevertheless, almost immediately after Trump won, the Post ran an editorial titled “The second resistance to Trump must start now.”
The problem is that, when “people are not reading your stuff,” fewer may be inclined to join a second resistance after rejecting the first resistance. Many are likely to doubt that a CBS anchor who could not even discuss the Trump victory without losing his composure will view the Trump Administration objectively in the coming years.
Even fewer are likely to believe assurance from figures like Helmuth that she will regain “editorial objectivity” after denouncing anyone supporting Trump as dumb racists.
Of course, if you believe that over half of the country is “dumb,” you may believe that they will just forget post-election meltdowns.
Maybe they are right. It was once said that “chumps prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth.” The problem is that, if this election proved one thing, it is that many voters clearly felt like they are being played as chumps by the media and political establishment.
Telling people to ignore what they saw did not work for the Great Oz, and it will work even less for the legacy media.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
I wrote and posted a piece on Substack and Twitter that I would hope would reach Trump or his inner circle for review.
The focus is that Jonathon Turley is the quintessential BEST choice for Trump to appoint as Attorney General. Honest, Non-Partisan, and deeply constitutional!
Read under my Nom De Guerre (ElvinUnleashed)
Substack: https://elvinunleashed.substack.com/p/jonathan-turley-the-ideal-candidate
On X: https://x.com/Elvin_Unleashed/status/1855691345781793225
Frank Trinkle posted: The focus is that Jonathon Turley is the quintessential BEST choice for Trump to appoint as Attorney General. Honest, Non-Partisan, and deeply constitutional!
ABSOLUTELY NOT!
I am willing to agree Professor Turley is a nice person who cares about rights – even if he only cares for some a little bit i.e. the 2nd Amendment versus those like the 1st Amendment that he’s consumed with and any and all infractions and limitations of the 1st Amendment. If only he were as equally good a champion of the 2nd Amendment. Seems like a bit of a flaw in his resume for the job…
The bigger problem however, is Professor Turley is handicapped by his inability to see malfeasance/evil in people who are fellow members of the legal professions.
An example of that is Merrick Garland. Over the last four years Professor Turley began with enthusiastic endorsement of him as a great Attorney General (just as you are pitching Turley for AG now). As Garland got deeper and deeper into waging police state fascism against not just Trump but J6 defendents who endangered the democracy by daring to take a selfie while trespassing on the Senate lawn, parents protesting at school board meetings that gender blending tranny rapists were being allowed into their daughters schools, what was Professor Turley’s response?
We got quizzical columns where he wondered first why Garland couldn’t see the error he was making. Then columns about how Garland was making a troubling mistake.
Now here we are nearing the end of Garland’s career as AG (and thankfully the end of his public legal career). And Professor Turley has still been unable while writing about subjects where Garland is a major player to come right out and state the obvious: his acquaintance and former judge Merrick Garland has been performing as a police state fascist when it comes to any person or group of people who have been an obstacle to the Biden/Harris agenda.
Professor Turley knows what he’s looking at in Garland. He knows the complete injustice of it all. He knows what police state fascism from governments looks like. He knows who Lavarentiy Beria was and how he served Stalin. Not just the vicious prosecutions, but the extreme measures Garland has taken to hide the criminality of the Bidens and DoJ bureaucrats who committed numerous felonies over the last eight years.
And for whatever reason, Professor Turley simply cannot bring himself to write that Garland has become a study in evil legal malfeasance and a police state fascist who has become the exact opposite of “equal justice for all”. He has become the Biden/Harris administrations version of Lavarentiy Beria, lacking only Lefortovo prison and a bullet to the back of the head in the basement.
When Professor Turley can’t bring himself to acknowledge what a cancer in American justice Merrick Garland and his actions are, he is not going to have the wherewithal to attempt to both steer the DoJ back to what it should be while at the same time spending the next four years rooting as many elements of that cancer out of the DoJ.
Try for a better nominee: this is not an exercise in academic theory. If you aren’t willing to recognize deliberate legal malfeasance, you can’t fight it.
Old Airborne Dog
Well Said, Old Airborne Dog … You did a good job sorting out Merrick Garland. He would be lucky to escape a prison cell, if judged on his afficancy. Never has Russian style Justice been used to surplant American style opinion on parents fighting against Teachers over their influence on transgender children. “Who are you going to believe, Me, or your lying eyes?” You’re not one to cast shadowy talk about…
The corporate flim flam media is dead. Trump killed it with the Joe Rogan 3-hour interview. The king is dead! Long live Joe Rogan!
Tell FEMA that they can repurpose their “quarantine camp” plans from the COVID era into “re-training facilities” for the useless bureaucrats, errant mass media misinformation specialists and academic parasites.
They will learn valuable skills in the new society besides spreading lies!
Those who do not work ,do not eat!
Saloth Sar
Democrats and left liberals see what the ancient scripture said THE VEDAS said ” Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make them go mad “.
I’m very interested in the Ved. If you could tell me which Ved that’s in, I’d love to know. Thank you!
Right back at her.
To the moon and back and the “scientific” magazine she rode in on.
There I feel much better, thanks.
ARREST FAUCI
Charge him with CONSPIRACY TO DEFRAUD THE UNITED STATES 18 U.S.C. § 371
if it turns out the CIA was in on the plan, to move the forbidden gain of research experiments in viruses to Wuhan — then arrest them too!
Saloth Sar
Without trump as the nominee they don’ t win
This is old news, unfortunately. The media, the universities and the federal bureaucracy are all very far to the left. They aren’t the Democrats of old. These are ideologues who do not really care about democracy (although they bemoan its demise under Trump). They care about winning. They arrogantly think that they are right and should be appointed philosopher-kings for life. Fortunately, social media is going to make these organizations less powerful. Joe Rogan will beat CNN viewers all day long. Trump needs to readjust this. There needs to be serious enforcement of anti-trust laws. Google should be broken up, despite their large donations to RINOS like Thune. The universities should have endowments taxed and should receive no federal money. The Department of Education, which is really just a public shell for the unions, should be shut down as the Constitution says health and welfare issues should be decided by the states, not Randi Weingarten. The media should also be broken up. The FCC used to not allow duopoly. Now it is common practice. Financial institutions should be broken up. These clowns should have been allowed to go broke after the last crash but were magically revived by politicians. The source of all of this is the greed of Congress – particularly many of the RINOS. The two McConnell suck ups have gotten most of their campaign cash from hedge funds. Thune got money from Google. It is time to end this. No more PAC money for Majority leaders to use to manipulate their minions. Most of the Senate PAC money comes from oil and Ken Griffin, a notorious RINO who hates Trump. One thing is clear. MAGA won and RINOS and Democrats lost. Root out the institutional corruption, not just in the media but everywhere. Politicians have given voters the finger long enough.
McCaskill was crying tears while saying she was SO PROUD of Harris’s campaign.
It was a horrible campaign. Harris couldn’t answer the most basic, predictable questions. She forfeited numerous opportunities to make a good impression with the public – didn’t even try.
McCaskill gives out participation trophies for political campaigns. So long as they’re her party.
I’m from Missouri and I was so happy when she was shown to door because the voters wanted her out of the Senate. I contacted her regarding the upcoming Obamacare bill in order to discuss my thoughts, as a practicing physician, with her. She expressed that she was not interested in anything that I had to say. As I hung up the phone, I realized that the bill was not a going to be good for most patients because we were going to be sold a bill of goods for certain special interests. It was worse than I imagined. Claire McCaskill was crying crocodile tears which I consider an insult to the crocodiles in the world.
The Democrats might want to consider how lucky they were in this election. If VP Harris hadn’t replaced President Biden or if the Republicans had nominated someone without all the baggage Trump has to carry around, the margin of victory would likely have been larger both in the Presidential and down-ballot contests.
The breadth, if not the scale, of Trump’s improvement across virtually all segments of the population is stunning. Trump may be responsible for some of that improvement. It is far more likely that most of it was caused by the public’s repudiation of the Democrat’s messages and messengers (Biden/Harris). During the primaries Nikki Haley typically polled better against President Biden than did Trump. What would the Democrats be saying today if Haley had trounced Harris? There would be no place to hide.
Good Lord, enough of the Nikki Haley. No one in touch with where the Rep party is in 2024 thinks there would be any enthusiasm for Haley. Polls…please.
Oh please… Nikki Haley couldn’t generate wind if she farted in a bag. She was seen as an unwelcome interloper in the contest between the two Dinosaurs Kings–Biden and Trump. When Harris deposed Biden she was grounded for her disloyalty and lambasted as Nasty Nancy’s choice. You see how she was excoriated by almost everyone except the TrueBlue Yellow Dog Dems… Trump crushed all opposition because Dems were so despicable everyone had to hold their nose and vote for Trump. His message reached untold millions, while the Dem Harpy screeched, “Donald Trump! Donald Trump!” She propagandized his name until she talked everyone into voting for Trump.
The left complains about Fox, but the left owns ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, WaPo, NYT, AP, Reuters, and Hollywood….and still couldn’t convince 51% of the country to believe them.
I want to believe especially as the reports come out about the extremely diverse support from every kind of a American for the election of Donald Trump that this was almost a melting pot event. The possibility exists that when one considers the diversity of the Biden/Kamala alienation of voters they managed to stomp on everyone except their I hate Trump base? As for the curtain it became transparent day by day with each denigration that the Democrat Party had nothing to offer our nation but hate and self loathing. Trump has said many times he is standing in their way. Could it be the rest of us already SEE that it isn’t just Trump they HATE. It is all of us who will not surrender our cherished beliefs that as free citizens belong to us… and not to them?