Could it be that the biggest threat to the freedom of the press is not the government—even a Trump-run government—but rather the press itself?

The left-leaning Politico recently ran a piece on the factors influencing journalism. A major factor, they report, is what they call the “geographic bubble.” They argue that the national media is becoming increasingly concentrated along the coasts. As recently as 2008, this wasn’t even the case, but if you are a journalist working on the scene today, there’s a good chance that you are working in pro-Clinton territory. More than that, you’re probably working in one of the most pro-Clinton areas of the country. Even the explosion of internet news sources hasn’t mitigated the intense aggregation process. Almost three-fourths of internet publishing jobs are packed into the northeast between D.C., Boston, and New York and on the west coast, between Seattle and San Diego. 

It’s not just a change in the media (increasing influence of social media and so on); it’s a change in sociopolitical dispersion. Almost 90 percent of internet news employees work in counties where Clinton won, and 72 percent of them work in counties where Clinton won by a landslide (i.e. a 30 percent difference).

It would be nice to think that these journalists are inoculated against the social milieu in which they work, and that it doesn’t impact what they write, or the way they edit or publish their stories, but even a left-leaning publisher like Politico finds the possibility of evenhandedness extremely unlikely.

It is not surprising, then, that media trust is not at an all-time low, but that there’s never been more of a discrepancy in media trust between Republicans and Democrats. There’s currently a 55-point difference. 21 percent of Republicans trust the media, whereas 76 percent of Democrats trust the media, the highest it’s been since Gallup started tracking media trust by party in 1997. Another way to break down the data is that about 80 percent of Republicans distrust the media, while about 80 percent of Democrats trust them. Trust among Independents is at 42 percent, the highest it’s been since 2005. It would seem that there is some kind of close link between the Democratic Party and the media’s dominant ideological slant.

In 1942, the Commission on Freedom of the Press performed a searching, five-year evaluation of the state of the media, the challenges to disseminating information effectively, and how it could best serve modern democracy. In 1947, the Committee determined that there were significant dangers to freedom of the press. For one, the free press had become increasingly important as it became an organ of mass communication. As such, it meant then—as it does now—that people are exposed to fewer and fewer perspectives. Moreover, those who are connected to the mass media channels can’t adequately provide for the needs of a society and have, on occasion, abused the trust of the public. The modern press, and its increasingly efficient methods of spreading information, means false information can be disseminated at speeds faster than the forefathers would have dreamed possible when they wrote about freedom of the press.

With this new power and potential for abuse in the modern press, the commission concludes, people “must live, if they are to live at all, by self-restraint, moderation and mutual understanding. They get their picture of one another through the press which can be “inflammatory, sensational, and irresponsible.” 

Do journalists today uphold a standard of integrity? Do their practices suggest that they take seriously the dangers to the free press discussed by the commission? Among many others, former CBS reporter and correspondent, Lara Logan, is convinced that the media have sold their soul. In an interview in February of 2019, she spoke candidly about the decline in media professionalism over the years, their strong preference for the Democratic platform, progressivism, and their removal or defamation of differing perspectives.

She compares the American media to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. There’s a small section where women can stand and pray, and the rest of the wall belongs to the men. If Fox News, Breitbart, and a handful of networks occupy that tiny section, then the far larger section is under the control of CNN, NBC, CBS, Politico, Huffington Post, and a slew of others. Logan argues that this is wrong, just as it would be wrong if the proportions were reversed.

For Logan, it’s not a question of fidelity to a political party, of being pro- or anti-Trump. The more fundamental issue is that, while the media has been a left-leaning institution throughout its history, the media has, by and large, given up the charade of dispassionate reporting. Having at least two firsthand sources used to be standard, but now there are countless stories circulating that are based on a single unverified tip from one anonymous official or another.

Logan argues that there’s a certain narrative that the journalism body has to uphold. In the rare event that a reporter goes off the script, the substance of what is said is largely ignored, and the rest of the press will try to destroy that reporter’s reputation and career. Apparently undeterred by the whistleblowing, a number of journalists lambasted and marginalized Logan when her interview went viral.

Prioritizing popular narrative at the expense of truth is dangerous, but that’s the game the media seems to be playing.

The American Revolution would not have begun or been successful without the printing press. Early American historian David Ramsay wrote in 1789 that “press and pen had equal merit to that of the sword” in bringing about independence from Britain. Unlike the French Revolution, and later the Russian Revolution, which were fraught with violence against their own citizens as they sought to establish a new society, the American Revolutionary War began well before “the shot heard round the world” in 1775. It began far more gently and subtly, but nonetheless powerfully, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

Far from a vicious upending of society, it was a realization of ideals that American colonists came to consider part of the just society and due to them: inalienable rights like individual liberty, equality under law, property rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. 

It was the numerous pamphlets and newspapers that unified Americans with a sense of principles worth rallying around and fighting to win. The press exposed the Revolutionary generation to ideas in the vein of Enlightenment rationalism—not just the liberal reform but enlightened conservatism.

In the years following the founding of the United States, the number of presses grew rapidly. They sprang up not just along the coast in city centers, but in far-flung towns and hamlets further inland. 

The ideas that the modern, progressive media promotes are a far cry from what the early Revolutionary press promoted in its influential pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which distinguished between society and government, and advocated for the minimization of the government’s involvement.

Those historians who were eye-witnesses or at least far closer to the Revolutionary War and the ethos that built it present the press as brave and unblushingly in favor of principles Progressive historians dislike. Many progressive historians revile the early press not because of its activism but because it’s the wrong variety of activism. Others will charge the early publishers with economic motives: at best, the early publishers were self-interested, and, at worst, charlatans who proffered a cause that duped and doomed thousands to a bloodbath in order to keep their operations afloat.

But far from being fraudulent or disingenuous, the early printers showed remarkable courage and moral fiber, and early historical accounts consistently reflect that.

The modern progressive media has a difficult time championing the early press when the early press was so ardent about principles that modern media would prefer to scrap. The twentieth century was full of denunciations of the Declaration of Independence as a stale and outdated document. President Woodrow Wilson, professor John Dewey, and many others saw the principles established in the Revolutionary generation as fine for their time, but inadequate for newer generations. They argued that the founding fathers would have wanted subsequent generations to discover their own principles. It’s difficult for progressives to approve the original purposes of the free press because it advocated so strongly for individual rights rather than collective rights, for limited government that gave individuals freedom to shape society over a strong centralized government full of experts who could socially engineer results.

The New York Times is the flagship of the progressive agenda and considered the gold standard of reporting. But the paper has a dark past of which few people are aware.

Why, for example, was the American public so reluctant to intervene on behalf of the Jews during the Holocaust? There’s often a sense of bewilderment that the United States entered the European fray as late as they did. But could it be that the American public was largely unaware of what was going on, that the press had been delinquent in reporting verified facts about millions of European Jews being systematically exterminated? Groupthink, journalistic malpractice, suppression, and self-censorship led to an ongoing Holocaust and the duping of the American public.

If the United States appeared unresponsive to the Holocaust, it had a lot to do with the fact that many—if not the majority—had no idea what Hitler was up to until 1944—almost the very end of the Second World War. When solid evidence of Nazi brutality came to the surface in the fall of 1942, the United States’ media ignored it or buried it. Despite FDR’s knowledge of events and his frequent press conferences (usually twice a week), nothing was said of the slaughter for over a year.

Despite its considerable influence, contacts, resources, and its position as the United States’ leading paper, the New York Times was largely reticent on the topic. Though Jewish-owned, the paper didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a pro-Jewish syndicate. The Times deemed the Holocaust a relatively minor story, and this sentiment emanated out to other journalists and policy-makers trying to make sense of the event. The paper’s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, purposely hid what should have been front-page stories about the Holocaust in the least-read sections of the paper. How would a story the Times described as “the greatest mass slaughter in history” end up in the bottom corner of page five and not on the front page?

A year’s worth of recent Times’ reporting on Israel reflects that the slant against the Jews continues. Senior research analyst, Gilead Ini, on the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) asserts that, based on the evidence, the New York Times “consistently flouts the rules of ethical journalism,” that it’s “part of a campaign to protect anti-Israel activists and steer public opinion against the Jewish state.”

The New York Times’ failure to inform the American public about Holocaust atrocities was not a one-off either. Between 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were starving under Stalin’s collectivist seizure of the satellite’s grain. Despite credible reports from numerous journalists throughout Europe regarding the abysmal state of affairs in the Ukraine, the Times’ correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, consistently reported that things were going swimmingly, that “the harvest is splendid and all talk of famine is now ridiculous.” Many suspected that Duranty was on Stalin’s payroll, as he got the royal treatment while living in Moscow.

 On September 26, 1933, Duranty confided to the British ambassador in Moscow that 10 million Ukrainians had starved within the past year. He knew the truth, but chose to cover it up, wielding his influence as a Times reporter to assassinate the character and competence of reporters who told a different story about the USSR. So brazen was his shamelessness that he accepted a Pulitzer Prize for excellence in journalism for his glowing coverage of the Soviet Union. Duranty’s high-society celebrity landed him in the company of FDR, Sinclair Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, and others.

The Times rejected later attempts to strip Duranty of his prize in journalism when the Stalinist horrors became more widely known. The Times' publisher offered feeble excuses about not wanting to set a precedent for revisiting old commendations, and that it would be Stalinist “to airbrush purged figures out of official records.”

The NYT’s under- and misreporting about the extermination of Jews and Ukrainians and their thin excuses years later should call into serious question the newspaper’s professionalism and integrity. And, unfortunately, the New York Times’ dark history reaches into the present, with journalists who write stories backwards: gathering facts that suit opinions rather than opinions that suit facts. The cost has been high for Jews, Ukrainians, and continues to be high for the American public.

The biggest threat to the freedom of the press is not Donald Trump but the press itself, with the New York Times leading the charge. As long as the mainstream press operates on the basis of groupthink, self-censorship, assassination of political apostates, and bias by omission, the media will continue to become toxic and the citizenry ignorant and vulnerable.