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FLASHBACK: The Liberal Media’s Long Record of Reviling Ronald Reagan

This Wednesday (June 5) marks 20 years since the passing of Ronald Reagan, the conservative Republican President whose policies led to record economic prosperity and laid the foundation for the peaceful end to the Cold War. In the years since his death, some in the media have used Reagan’s memory as a weapon to bash today’s Republican Party. In 2015, for example, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell juxtaposed the Gipper with his would-be successors: “Reagan’s message was infused with sunny optimism, the flip side of today’s angry rhetoric.... Reagan saw America as a shining sit on the hill. A country welcoming people in, not shutting them out.” But that’s not how Mitchell (NBC’s White House reporter in the 1980s) and her colleagues characterized Reagan when he was implementing his successful conservative program. As NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham documented 20 years ago, the liberal media harshly, and wrongly, portrayed Reagan during his life “as an unintelligent airhead who lived in a fantasy world, a mesmerizing Music Man fooling the public with a phony bill of goods, a man who was cruel or uncaring to poor people, and a puppet for the greedy rich.” The MRC’s archives are stuffed with quotes revealing how the media routinely derided both Reagan and his policies. Given how history has since unfolded, these quotes show how their anti-conservative bias proved a poor guide for journalists seeking to write a “first draft of history.” Here’s just a sample: ■ “The Reagan Administration has made a bad situation worse... by challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, calling the USSR an ‘evil empire’ doomed to fail.”— Time’s Strobe Talbott on U.S.-Soviet relations, May 21, 1984 issue. ■ “If F.D.R. explored the upper limits of what government could do for the individual, Reagan is testing the lower limits. Reagan’s opinions and policies would be enough in another time to have protesters marching in the streets, or worse. And yet something about Reagan soothes and unites — even though the effects of his programs may repel.”— Essayist Lance Morrow in the July 7, 1986 Time magazine cover story, “Why Is This Man So Popular?” ■ “I think [Reagan] is going to have to pass two or three tests. The first is, will he get there, stand in front of the podium, and not drool?”— ABC White House reporter Sam Donaldson on a planned Reagan press conference, NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman, March 18, 1987. ■ “I predict historians are going to be totally baffled by how American people fell in love with this man and followed him the way we did.”— CBS’s Lesley Stahl on NBC’s Later with Bob Costas, January 11, 1989. ■ “After eight years of what many saw as the Reagan Administration’s benign neglect of the poor and studied indifference to civil rights, a lot of those who lived through this week in Overtown seemed to think the best thing about George Bush is that he is not Ronald Reagan....There is an Overtown in every big city in America. Pockets of misery made even meaner and more desperate the past eight years.”— ABC’s Richard Threlkeld reporting from a section of Miami where there had been riots, on World News Tonight, January 20, 1989. ■ “Largely as a result of the policies and priorities of the Reagan Administration, more people are becoming poor and staying poor in this country than at any time since World War II.”— Bryant Gumbel on NBC’s Today, July 17, 1989. ■ “As this decade comes to a close, the United States has the highest rate of poverty in the industrial world, 32 million poor people and no one knows exactly how many of them are hungry and homeless. So that ‘shining city on a hill’ of which President Reagan spoke in his farewell address remains to these Americans a mirage and will remain so until we come to see them — men, women and children — as people like us.”— Bill Moyers after PBS’s re-airing of 1982 CBS Reports “People like Us,” June 20, 1989. ■ “Analysts will also recognize that Ronald Reagan presided over a meltdown of the federal government during the last eight years. Fundamental management was abandoned in favor of rhetoric and imagery. A cynical disregard for the art of government led to wide-scale abuse....Only now are we coming to realize the cost of Mr. Reagan’s laissez-faire: the crisis in the savings and loan industry, the scandal in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the deterioration of the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities, the dangerous state of the air traffic control system — not to mention the staggering deficit.”— CBS reporter Terence Smith in a New York Times op-ed piece, November 5, 1989. ■ “It will take 100 years to get the government back into place after Reagan. He hurt people: the disabled, women, nursing mothers, the homeless.”— White House reporter Sarah McClendon in USA Today, February 16, 1990. ■ “Some say Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by spending so much on defense that the Kremlin went bankrupt trying to keep up. That won’t wash. During Reagan’s presidency the United States itself became a bankrupt country.”— Commentator (and former anchor) John Chancellor on the November 20, 1990 NBC Nightly News. ■ “We went through a trance with a mesmerizing leader and enjoyed the moment. You remember it was good morning again, morning again in America, and the sun was always coming up. No dark clouds, live for the moment, don’t worry about the debts, don’t worry about tomorrow, don’t worry about paying them off, don’t worry about the long-term future. And I think that’s the legacy....I don’t think I said the most lawless. I think the record is the worst since the Harding years and that’s probably saying about the same thing.”— Former Washington Post editor Haynes Johnson discussing his Reagan-bashing book Sleepwalking Through History, March 12, 1991 Today. ■ “By many measures, the Reagan Administration was a failure. It left us with a huge debt and an unfocused domestic policy. It got us in a moral mess with Irangate and a military disaster in Lebanon.”— NBC News President Michael Gartner reviewing Lou Cannon’s book, President Reagan: Role of a Lifetime in The Washington Post, April 21, 1991. ■ “The amazing thing is most people seem content to believe that almost everybody had a good time in the ’80s, a real shot at the dream. But the fact is, they didn’t. Did we wear blinders? Did we think the ’80s just left behind the homeless? The fact is that almost nine in ten Americans actually saw their lifestyle decline.”— NBC reporter Keith Morrison, February 7, 1992 Nightly News. ■ “We keep looking for some good to come out of this. Maybe it might help in putting race relations on the front burner, after they’ve been subjugated for so long as a result of the Reagan years.”— NBC’s Bryant Gumbel talking about deadly riots in Los Angeles, April 30, 1992 Today. ■ “[Bush] is about to make matters worse by hauling out Ronald Reagan at the Republican convention. Reagan has become a symbol of what went wrong in the ’80s. It’s like bringing the Music Man back to River City, a big mistake.”— Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group, August 1, 1992. ■ “The subtext of the recovery-and-healing line is that America is a self-abusive binger that must go through recovery. Thus: the nation borrowed and spent recklessly in the 1980s, drank too deeply of Reagan fantasies about ‘Morning in America’ and supply-side economics. And now, on the morning after, the U.S. wakes up at the moment of truth and looks in the mirror. Hence: America needs the ‘courage to change’ in a national atmosphere of recovery, repentance and confession.”— Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow welcoming the Clinton presidency, January 4, 1993. ■ “Reagan got his taxation program through, which was to cut taxes to the bone....What Reagan did was destroy the economy!”— ABC’s Sam Donaldson on This Week with David Brinkley, March 28, 1993. ■ “I think the best evidence I can give that we do a lousy job covering politics is to look at the politicians: Ronald Reagan was President of us for eight years — Ronald Reagan! Reporters should have been writing for the entire eight years of his reign that this man was gone, out of it....He should have been covered as a clown.”— NBC reporter Bob Herbert during a panel discussion at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in Fall 1992, as reported in a June 21, 1993 National Review article. ■ “In the plague years of the 1980s — that low decade of denial, indifference, hostility, opportunism, and idiocy — government fiddled, medicine diddled, and the media were silent or hysterical. A gerontocratic Ronald Reagan took this [AIDS] plague less seriously than Gerald Ford had taken swine flu. After all, he didn’t need the ghettos and he didn’t want the gays.”— CBS Sunday Morning TV critic John Leonard, September 5, 1993. ■ “The legacy of the Reagan administration will be with us for years. The deficit under Reagan totaled more than a trillion dollars. Someday we’re going to have to pay those bills. As officials look to cut spending and taxes at the same time, we can’t afford another round of voodoo economics....I remember that campaign slogan one year ‘It’s morning again in America.’ Well, it may have been morning for some, but for a lot of people in this country it’s become a nightmare.”— CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley in an April 28, 1996 speech to Benedictine University in Illinois, aired May 11, 1996 on C-SPAN. ■ “If there is any President who does not deserve credit for our current economic prosperity it is Ronald Reagan. The latter part of the 1980s will go down as one of the most poorly-managed, economically reckless fiscal periods in American history.”— PBS To the Contrary host Bonnie Erbe, February 28, 1998 syndicated column. ■ “Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead! That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999.”— NBC co-host Katie Couric opening Today before an interview with Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, who actually wrote that President Reagan was “an apparent airhead.” Morris corrected Couric: “He was a very bright man.” ■ “The sad truth is that many Republican leaders remain in a massive state of denial about the party’s four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting....It’s with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican [Party]’s selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out.”— Time’s Jack E. White in a column posted on Time.com on December 14, 2002. ■ “Before Reagan, people sleeping in the street were so rare that, outside of skid rows, they were almost a curiosity. After eight years of Reaganomics — and the slashes in low-income housing and social welfare programs that went along with it — they were seemingly everywhere. And America had a new household term: ‘The homeless.’”— Reporter Kevin Fagan in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 10, 2004, five days after Reagan’s death. ■ “I don’t think history has any reason to be kind to him.”— CBS’s Morley Safer recalling the late Ronald Reagan on CNN’s Larry King Live, June 14, 2004. For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.                          

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WRAP-UP: TV’s Negative, Nasty, Lurid & Obsessive Coverage of Trump’s Trial

Jury deliberations have begun in Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump. Regardless of the verdict, Trump’s Democratic opponents have already received a massive media bonus from the flimsy legal case. Unlike the jury in the courtroom, millions of citizens have seen the evidence only as depicted by the liberal news networks — an often skewed version that seemed more designed to embarrass and antagonize the Republican presidential candidate than to scrutinize the merits of the case against him. Key findings of a study by the Media Research Center: ♦ ABC, CBS, and NBC have doled out more than ten hours (640 minutes) on the case. ♦ Out of 110 evening news stories, only three hinted that D.A. Alvin Bragg was a partisan Democrat. ♦ Guilty until proven innocent? Viewers heard the word “criminal” used 111 times in relation to the presumptive GOP nominee, slightly more than once per story. ♦ Burying Michael Cohen’s perjury conviction: 96 percent of TV’s Cohen coverage during the past six weeks omitted Cohen’s perjury conviction. ♦ Hiding Judge Merchan’s conflicts: None of the network evening newscasts informed viewers of any of the several conflicts raised against Judge Juan Merchan, including one donation to Joe Biden and another to the group “Stop Republicans.” ■ In just six weeks, ABC, CBS, and NBC have doled out more than ten hours (640 minutes) on the case across their flagship morning, evening, and Sunday political talk shows to interfere in the 2024 election. ABC has delivered the most coverage, an exhaustive 257 minutes that accounts for 40 percent of the overall tally. NBC’s news shows have supplied 222 minutes of trial coverage, while CBS churned out 161 minutes. While the networks have pushed the Trump trial to the top of the news, that’s not the case with an ongoing case of Democratic corruption. Since our report last week, there’s been zero additional broadcast coverage of liberal Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ)’s bribery trial; the tally remains stuck at a piddling seven minutes and 56 seconds. A detailed analysis of the three evening newscasts: A deep dive into the networks’ nightly coverage — which accounts for 244 minutes of the broadcast total — can be used to extrapolate how biased journalists leveraged the left-wing Democratic D.A.’s pursuit of a weak legal case to tarnish the former President and 2024 frontrunner with weeks of negative, tabloid headlines. Our analysts reviewed all 110 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories that discussed Trump’s New York trial from April 14 (the day before it began) through the start of deliberations on May 29. ■ A Nonpartisan Prosecution? Out of 110 evening news stories, only three hinted that D.A. Alvin Bragg was a partisan Democrat. The CBS Evening News never permitted this point to be made during the trial, while ABC let it slip just once, in the form of a soundbite from Trump on the May 12 World News Tonight, when the former President was heard calling Bragg a “radical Democrat District Attorney.” On the NBC Nightly News, there were exactly two references to Bragg as a Democrat. “Mr. Trump lambastes the case as a Democratic conspiracy to hurt his re-election chances,” reporter Laura Jarrett summarized on April 15. A week later (April 22), anchor Lester Holt teed up reporter Hallie Jackson: “Hallie, this is a partisan prosecution in the opinion of Mr. Trump?” Jackson replied, “Yeah, that’s what his campaign has been saying.” There were three stories (one on NBC, two on ABC) that directly referenced lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, but none explained he had left a high-ranking job at Joe Biden’s Justice Department to join Bragg’s prosecution of Trump. Similarly, there were six stories which identified prosecutor Joshua Steinglass and two others that named Susan Hoffinger, but no explanation that the duo were veteran Trump antagonists, having helped Bragg previously prosecute the former President’s businesses in another case. Instead, the networks presented the case as a strictly law enforcement exercise, referring almost always to “the prosecutors/the prosecution” (216 times) or “the state” (7 times). On May 6, CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell introduced the case as “the People of the State of New York vs. Donald J. Trump,” thoroughly disguising the reality that this was not “the people” at work, but rather partisan Democrats. ■ Guilty until proven innocent? On April 15, ABC’s Aaron Katersky branded Trump “the first President in U.S. history to stand trial as a criminal defendant.” The same night, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell touted “the first criminal prosecution of a former President of the United States.” Of course that’s true, but only because of the partisan Bragg’s decision to indict Trump last year. Nevertheless, the networks enthusiastically hammered the point night after night. From April 14 through May 29, viewers heard the word “criminal” used 111 times in relation to the presumptive GOP nominee, slightly more than once per story; the term “felony” was heard an additional 18 times. Separately, NBC Nightly News used the more accurate phrase “low-level felony” nine times to describe the “Class E” (lowest level) charges against Trump, a distinction that the other broadcast networks never made. And, our analysts found, the phrase “hush money” — a tabloid term to describe a legal non-disclosure agreement — was used 113 times in these six weeks. In any other legal context, such repeated use of loaded language — “criminal,” “felony,” “hush money” — would be seen as creating a presumption of guilt around a defendant whom the legal system would consider innocent until proven guilty. NBC was the only network to provide any airtime to key points that would have given viewers important context, including how the previous Democratic District Attorney in Manhattan (Cy Vance), as well as federal prosecutors had looked at the same material and declined to press charges. NBC’s Laura Jarrett stated this fact twice on Nightly News, once on April 15 and again on April 22. Jarrett also undermined the prosecution's claim during opening statements that Trump’s conduct was “election fraud, pure and simple.” But, the NBC reporter countered: “Mr. Trump is not facing conspiracy or campaign finance violations, something the defense sought to highlight today.” While all of the networks quoted the arguments of Trump and his lawyers, Jarrett was the only correspondent who herself challenged elements of the prosecution’s case in advance of deliberations — and then for only 44 seconds (out of 244 total minutes of trial coverage). ■ Burying Michael Cohen’s perjury conviction: As would be expected, the networks’ coverage spent a significant portion of their airtime discussing former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s role in the case. From April 14 through May 29, the networks spent 75 minutes on Cohen, out of 244 total minutes, or roughly 30% of the evening news coverage. Yet despite Cohen’s central role in both the case and the coverage, network reporters barely mentioned his previous conviction for perjury. This inconvenient fact received just 94 seconds on the CBS Evening News, 80 seconds on the NBC Nightly News, and a pathetic 10 seconds on ABC’s World News Tonight. “One major challenge for prosecutors is getting the jury to believe Michael Cohen,” CBS’s Robert Costa admitted on May 13. “He’s a convicted felon who spent time in prison and admitted lying to Congress.” It was a “major challenge,” yet 96 percent of TV’s Cohen coverage during the past six weeks omitted this crucial fact. If the chief accuser of a Democratic politician had been a previously convicted liar, it’s not far-fetched to assume that such information would rate much more coverage than was the case with Cohen’s accusations against Trump. ■ Hiding Judge Merchan’s conflicts: None of the network evening newscasts informed viewers of any of the several conflicts raised against Judge Juan Merchan, including one donation to Joe Biden and another to the group “Stop Republicans,” both in 2020. “While the amounts here are minimal, it’s surprising that a sitting judge would make political donations of any size to a partisan candidate or cause,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig commented last year. The closest any viewers came to learning about the questions surrounding Merchan’s bias came when Trump was shown speaking outside the courtroom, as on the April 18 CBS Evening News: “You’ve got a D.A. that’s out of control. You have a judge that’s highly conflicted.” Yet throughout the trial, reporters never explained the conflicts that Trump referred to. The last time any network newscasts did was weeks earlier on April 2, when NBC Nightly News reporter Gabe Gutierrez provided one sentence of context explaining why Merchan’s gag order had been expanded to include “relatives of court staff.” Why? Because, Gutierrez noted, “Mr. Trump on social media attacked the judge’s adult daughter, who is a political consultant for Democrats.” That’s the last time any evening news viewer actually heard about the younger Merchan’s work as President of Authentic Campaigns, with clients such as California Democratic Senate candidate Adam Schiff, a longtime Trump nemesis, and even current Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. Instead of focusing on these conflicts, the networks presented Merchan as an unbiased voice of authority. Most of the time (57% of stories), Merchan wasn’t even referred to by name, merely as “the judge,” cloaking him in the institutional respect that the role presumes ■ Heavy on the sleaze: Instead of scrutinizing the case against Trump, the networks (especially ABC and CBS) reveled in the tawdry, tabloid testimony against him — even though they had been previously reported years earlier, and had little to do with the question of business records at the heart of the case. On 91 occasions (sometimes more than once per story), evening news viewers heard allegations that Trump engaged in extramarital sex. Most, but not all, of these references were accompanied by a perfunctory, one-sentence reminder that Trump had denied all such charges. The word “porn” was used 47 times, compared with 35 instances when the slightly-less vulgar “adult film” modifier was used to describe Stormy Daniels’ profession. Fourteen times, viewers heard that another accuser, Karen McDougal, was a “Playboy” model. The networks regurgitated old and negative claims against Trump, even if they were not permitted in court. In advance of the trial, Judge Merchan forbade playing clips of the infamous Access Hollywood tape — first shown eight years ago — in order, the judge wrote, “to avoid undue prejudice.” Yet ABC’s World News Tonight ran such prejudicial clips six times during the trial, while the CBS Evening News aired such material twice. “I just start kissing them,” those tuning in to CBS on April 25 heard Trump allegedly telling Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” ABC viewers heard Trump boast all six times the Access Hollywood tape was mentioned on World News Tonight. “They let you do anything.” NBC Nightly News was once again the most restrained, running the video just once with sound (April 21), and then only an innocuous clip of Trump saying “nice to see you” to a woman outside the trailer. Four times, the CBS Evening News dug up clips from their network’s six-year-old 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels, including a segment in which Daniels alleged she had “unprotected sex” with Trump and how she supposedly directed the future President to “turn around and take off his pants,” and “gave him a couple of swats.” In that same May 7 newscast, CBS News legal expert Rikki Klieman explained it was all irrelevant: “There is no legal significance to the salacious details” in Daniels’ testimony — and none, presumably, in the inflammatory quotes resurrected by CBS for the trial. ■ A six-week long negative ad: This wave of tawdry allegations, plus a prosecution presented as nonpartisan, added up to heavily negative coverage of the former President. Between April 14 and May 29, our analysts tallied 230 negative statements about Trump related to the trial, vs. just seven positive statements (mostly soundbites from pro-Trump rallygoers who rejected the idea that the case might shake their support). This translates to 97% negative coverage (methodological details below), which would be  historic negativity if it wasn’t nearly identical to these networks previous coverage of Trump in other contexts. Don’t think this steady drumbeat of negative anti-Trump news doesn’t matter: An April poll by NBC News found that while Trump had a narrow (46% to 44%) national lead, voters who say they primarily get their information from “national network news like NBC, ABC or CBS” said they preferred Biden in a landslide (55% to 35%). And, according to NBC’s poll, nearly one-third of voters (32%) say they depend on the “national network news” for their information. For the last six weeks, those voters have been treated to a festival of Trump-bashing, as the networks amplify the worst allegations against the former President. So even if the trial doesn’t give liberals the Trump conviction they’ve yearned for, it’s still been an election-year bonanza for Democrats, who’ve enjoyed watching their nemesis getting pilloried by the press. +++++ METHODOLOGY:  We calculated the spin of Trump’s trial coverage by tallying all clearly positive and negative statements from non-partisan or unaffiliated sources — in other words, reporters, anchors, voters. We excluded evaluative comments from Trump himself, his staff and identified surrogates, as well as all identified Democrats. It also excludes “horse race assessments” about the candidates’ prospects for winning or losing.

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FLASHBACK: When CNN Censored Obama’s 2008 Memorial Day Idiocy

How far would a liberal network go to protect their favorite candidate? Sixteen years ago, CNN deliberately censored a blunder by likely Democratic nominee Barack Obama, when in a Memorial Day speech before veterans, he stupidly said of America’s “fallen heroes” that “I see many of them in the audience here today.” Actually, Obama’s audience in Las Cruces, New Mexico on May 26, 2008, consisted of veterans who were alive and well, not those who had fallen in service to their country. It was the sort of goofy gaffe that would haunt a Republican candidate for days. Then-Associate Editor Noel Sheppard made sure to quickly embed video of Obama’s unedited speech on NewsBusters, predicting: “You’re not likely to hear about this, because it seems a metaphysical certitude Obama-loving media won’t consider this newsworthy.” But it wasn’t just that the media ignored the embarrassing story (although they did). The next day, CNN’s Joe Johns crafted a report about Obama’s patriotism, and decided to include this exact soundbite from the Democrat’s Memorial Day speech. But he and his producers deliberately edited out the clause “and I see many of them in the audience here today” to create the illusion that Obama’s gaffe never even happened. On May 26, CNN covered Obama’s Memorial Day speech live, but joined it in progress a few moments after it began, so the ridiculous phrase wasn’t shown in real time. The next night, during the 8pm Election Center program, anchor Campbell Brown introduced brief clips of both Obama and GOP candidate John McCain at Memorial Day events. This was CNN viewers’ only chance to see the uncensored quote from Obama, although it aired without any acknowledgment from Brown that it was a mistake: CAMPBELL BROWN: Over the holiday, both Obama and McCain surrounded themselves with flags and rubbed elbows with veterans. It was all about patriotism. BARACK OBAMA: On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong. JOHN MCCAIN: I have had the good fortune to know personally a great many brave and selfless patriots who sacrificed and shed blood to defend America. But I have known none braver and none better than those who do so today. Later in the same show, viewers saw a packaged report from reporter Joe Johns about Obama’s patriotism. If you watch the video (below), you’ll see a faint flash effect — that’s where CNN snipped out Obama’s error, to make it seem as if it never occurred. JOHN JOHNS: This is Barack Obama doing what you would expect a guy running for president to do on Memorial Day. He’s honoring those who sacrificed everything. BARACK OBAMA: On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes, our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.     The next day (Wednesday, May 28), the same deceitful piece ran again on CNN during the 11am and 3pm hours. The edited clip was only about two seconds shorter than the original, so the idea that it was done to save time is extremely unlikely. The only plausible explanation is that Johns, or someone else at CNN, decided to censor their favorite candidate’s stupidest comment of the day to spare him embarrassment. The “I see dead people” gaffe came just days after Obama had talked about the U.S. having 58 states (“I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go”), and ridiculously stated that 10,000 people had died in a tornado in Kansas (in fact, 11 people had died). Yet in spite of ongoing questions about whether the freshman Senator was actually ready to be President, none of these amateur goofs were seriously covered by the liberal media. But in removing the key phrase from Obama’s Memorial Day quote, CNN went beyond just ignoring the Democrat’s blunders. The network deliberately doctored a quote to improve the candidate’s image. It’s certainly not the worst mistake a candidate has made on the campaign trail, but it’s telling that CNN decided they would rather hide it from viewers than let them make their own judgment about its relative importance. For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.

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FLASHBACK: Leftist Media HATED Republicans Long Before Trump

It’s one of those rhetorical devices you often hear on the liberal networks: media condemnations of “today’s Republican Party,” suggesting that if only Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or Mitt Romney were in charge instead of Donald Trump, journalists would be brimming with respect for the Grand Old Party. “Much of today’s Republican Party has been permeated by extremism,” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria blasted in 2021 as he called for an “exorcism” to purge the evil spirits. MSNBC’s Mike Brzezinski was more directly partisan: “The Democratic party is the world’s last, best, hope against fascism,” she railed in 2022, “against an extreme, autocratic anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-contraception, anti-freedom collection of fascists, who dominate the Trump wing of today’s Republican Party.” It’s all convenient revisionism; the same media aggressively trashed yesterday’s Republican party and old-fashioned traditional conservatives, too. “Republicans have been truly despicable on race,” Newsweek’s Joe Klein fulminated in 1994. Two years later, Time’s Jack E. White insinuated “cynical conservatives” were the real culprits behind a cluster of church burnings in 1996. “They may not start fires, but they fan the flames.” When Obama ran in 2008, Newsweek’s writers deplored online conservatives as “merchants of slime and sellers of hate.” In 2010, a Washington Post columnist likened the anti-tax Tea Party to the segregationist mobs in the 1950s who wanted to lynch a girl just for trying to attend high school. In 2012, an MSNBC host accused Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney! — of a cynical strategy of “niggerization” against President Obama: “He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama.” “Today’s Republican party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis,” accused another Washington Post columnist in early 2015, when Jeb Bush was seen as the likely GOP candidate for president. “It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it.” So don’t believe the revisionist spin that liberal journalists respected Republicans and conservatives before Donald Trump and MAGA came along and ruined everything. Here are a dozen quotes that show otherwise: ■ “Traditionally — at least since Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ — Republicans have been truly despicable on race, and there are more than a few stalwarts who continue to bloviate disingenuously in support of a ‘colorblind’ society, by which they mean a tacit relapse into segregation.”— Newsweek’s Joe Klein, writing in the magazine’s June 24, 1994 issue. ■ “Over the past 18 months, while Republicans fulminated about welfare and affirmative action, more than 20 churches in Alabama and six other Southern and Border states have been torched....There is already enough evidence to indict the cynical conservatives who build their political careers, George Wallace-style, on a foundation of race-baiting. They may not start fires, but they fan the flames.”— Time national correspondent Jack E. White, March 18, 1996 issue. ■ “The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities....The real question is whether he [Sen. John McCain] can — or really wants to — rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet and fund the ‘independent expenditure’ groups who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech.”— Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas in an eight-page cover package touting “The O Team,” May 19, 2008 Newsweek. ■ “The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school’s first black student, bravely tried to walk to class. Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. ‘They moved closer and closer,’ recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. ‘Somebody started yelling, “Lynch her! Lynch her!”’”— The Washington Post’s Colbert King in a March 27, 2010 column. ■ “Tonight, we start with the party of hate. The Republican Party in this country has been running on hate and division for the last 50 years....What black person, gay guy or girl, immigrant or Muslim American in their right mind would vote for the Republican Party? They might as well hang a sign around their neck saying, ‘I hate myself.’”— Fill-in host Cenk Uygur on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, August 26, 2010.     ■ “You notice he [Mitt Romney] says ‘anger’ twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama. The other-ization, he’s not like us. I know it’s a heavy thing to say. I don’t say it lightly. But this is niggerization, ‘You are not one of us,’ and that ‘you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.’”— Co-host Touré on MSNBC’s The Cycle, August 16, 2012. ■ “A Romney takeover of the White House might well rival Andrew Johnson’s ascendancy to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865….A Romney win would be worrisome…because of his strong embrace of states’ rights and his deep mistrust of the federal government — sentiments Andrew Johnson shared….Johnson stood by as Southern states enacted ‘black codes,’ which restricted rights of freed blacks and prevented blacks from voting. Romney stood by last year as Republican-controlled state legislatures passed voter-identification laws, making it harder for people of color, senior citizens and people with disabilities to exercise their fundamental right to vote.”— Washington Post editorial writer Colbert I. King in his November 3, 2012 column, “Mitt Romney could be the next Andrew Johnson.” ■ “Why do we have so many know-nothings in the Congress who deny not just mankind’s history, or the obvious evidence of climate change, but the fiscal arithmetic that stares us in the face?...What do you call this, this dangerous zig-zagging toward the abyss... while the zealots of the right wing scream louder and louder that victory lies in catastrophe — Kool-Aid for everyone, and defeatists will be shot!”— Chris Matthews opening MSNBC’s Hardball, October 7, 2013. ■ “The story of this political crisis is really, you know, the culpability not just of the Republican crazies, but of the Republican non-crazies. I mean, how did we get to the point where Mitch McConnell is Rand Paul’s bitch?... Where’s the heroism in your own party? I mean, why aren’t the moderate Republicans, you know, fighting back? We’re always saying why don’t, you know, the moderate Muslims fight jihad, but, you know, this is jihad.”— The Daily Beast editor-in-chief Tina Brown interviewing Senator John McCain on October 10, 2013 for her Web site’s annual “Hero Summit,” a clip of which was shown later that day on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports. ■ “The essence of this Tea Party is a racist institution. It is born of the fact that they cannot stand the fact that a black man is President of the United States. But it also shows me that despite what happened in Virginia — right? — this Republican Party hasn’t learned one lesson. They still will go as far right as they can, as extreme on the extreme fringe of the Republican Party. That’s who’s leading the party today.”— Former CNN Crossfire co-host Bill Press on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, December 16, 2013.     ■ “There are a few things I hate more than the NRA [National Rifle Association]. I mean truly. I think they’re pigs. I think they don’t care about human life. I think they are a curse upon the American landscape.”— Former NBC and CBS morning news host Bryant Gumbel in an interview with Rolling Stone posted January 20, 2015. ■ “Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today’s Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it.”— Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, April 8, 2015. For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.                          

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FLASHBACK: When ABC News Buried Top Anchor’s Ethical Scandal

Nine years ago this week, ABC News was roiled by a journalistic scandal: Their top political anchor had refused to disclose his big dollar contributions to the Clinton Foundation at the same time he used ABC’s airwaves in an attempt to discredit an anti-Clinton author, an obvious favor to the just-launched Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. Yet after a few days of bad headlines, and a pair of on-air apologies, George Stephanopoulos simply resumed covering politics as if nothing had happened. ABC’s casual attitude matched the blind eye the network had turned to the anchor’s obvious bias over two decades as a pundit, correspondent and anchor. Stephanopoulos first achieved celebrity status as a staffer on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, later spending four years at the White House as a spokesman and senior advisor. After Clinton’s re-election in 1996, the thoroughly partisan Stephanopoulos jumped to ABC News — first as a liberal commentator, but later as a supposedly neutral news anchor. “If I were biased, I don’t believe I would have gotten the job,” Stephanopoulos bragged to Newsday in 2002, after he was tapped to helm ABC’s Sunday morning show, soon to be re-named This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Of course, Stephanopoulos is completely biased; one only needed to look at his on-air utterances to see it plainly. Yet to maintain the illusion of objectivity, Stephanopoulos needed to at least superficially conform to journalists’ norms — such as NOT donating tens of thousands of dollars to the pet causes of the Democratic partisans he was supposed to be covering objectively. The immediate problem: Stephanopoulos had gone on the attack on the April 26, 2015 edition of This Week, grilling investigative author Peter Schweizer over a book showing massive foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, all while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and then a leading presidential candidate. (Hillary had declared her candidacy just two weeks earlier, on April 12.) Stephanopoulos impugned Schweizer as biased because he had worked for Republicans and received funding from a conservative source. “You used to work for President Bush as a speech writer. You are funded by the Koch brothers,” Stephanopoulos lectured Schweizer in an unusually hostile interview. But Stephanopoulos — who had an even more partisan pedigree — hadn’t told viewers about the $75,000 he had donated the Clinton Foundation as recently as 2014. In mid-May, the Washington Free Beacon called ABC News, asking for comments about these contributions. With the story about to break, ABC appears to have tipped the information to a friendlier reporter, Politico’s Dylan Byers, who broke the news on Thursday, May 14, 2015. Byers quoted from an e-mail statement from Stephanopoulos: “I thought that my contributions were a matter of public record. However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the Foundation. I apologize.” Byers’ Politico colleague, Jack Shafer, blasted it as “unbecoming” for a news organization like ABC to punish the Free Beacon by handing their scoop to another outlet. “Government and business play this retaliatory game all the time when journalists surprise them with a request for comment. What’s unbecoming is that a news organization might engage in this practice.” Yet, as Shafer acidly noted, it’s “precisely the type of thing you can imagine the Stephanopoulos-era Clinton administration doing without compunction.” Later that day, Stephanopoulos took the minimal step of bowing out as moderator of a February 2016 debate among GOP presidential candidates — as if the Republicans would have showed up if he was in charge. “I won’t moderate that debate,” Stephanopoulos assured Politico’s Byers. “I want to be sure I don’t deprive viewers of a good debate.” Critics were unimpressed. “This blunder by Stephanopoulos is so severe that it really threatens to undo what he’s accomplished in his 18 years at ABC News,” FNC’s Howard Kurtz exclaimed that Thursday night. “For him, as a top ABC anchor, to give this money to the Clinton Foundation while covering the story is in itself a grave error in judgment. But then to not tell his bosses at ABC News, to not disclose it to the viewers, it’s unthinkable.” “It is quite obvious Stephanopoulos should have recused himself from that interview” with Peter Schweizer, NewsBusters editor Tim Graham argued that same day on FBN’s Varney & Co., “or he should have had the decency and the ethics to announce to the audience that he had donated tens of thousands of dollars to the foundation that he very much looked like he was defending.” Schweizer agreed, telling Bloomberg Politics that Stephanopoulos’s failure was a “massive breach of ethical standards....He fairly noted my four months working as a speech writer for George W. Bush. But he didn’t disclose this?” But ABC News wouldn’t concede a thing. “He’s admitted to an honest mistake and apologized for that omission. We stand behind him,” the network said in a statement to Politico. Stephanopoulos offered formulaic apologies on the two shows he anchored: Good Morning America and This Week. “Over the last several years, I have made substantial donations to dozens of charities, including the Clinton Global Foundation,” Stephanopoulos announced on the May 15 Good Morning America. “Those donations were a matter of public record. But I should have made additional disclosures on-air when we covered the foundation and I now believe directing personal donations to that foundation was a mistake.” Two days later, This Week viewers saw a nearly identical apology. “I should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. I apologize to all of you for failing to do that.”     As Stephanopoulos was mouthing his first apology, ABC alumnus Geraldo Rivera was on Fox & Friends, pointing out that when he was fired in 1985, the reason given was a mere $200 contribution to a non-partisan mayoral campaign. But a key difference, according to Rivera: “George Stephanopoulos is the darling of ABC News management so they will treat him with kid gloves.” Perhaps the last word on the topic (at least on ABC’s airwaves), came the following month, when Stephanopoulos scored an interview with the just-announced candidate for the 2016 Republican nomination, Donald Trump. Stephanopoulos asked Trump what he thought about Hillary Clinton. “Of course, you shouldn’t be talking to me about that, in all fairness,” Trump tweaked, in obvious reference to Stephanopoulos’s conflicts of interest. “You shouldn’t be asking me those questions, but I don’t mind.” For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.