The Media Are Egotistical Exaggerators and Liars

Written by Tim Graham

The 2024 presidential campaign is ending pretty much where it began: loathing the never-ending presence of Donald Trump. On the day before the election, The New York Times front page displayed a gaudy editorial (badly disguised as “News Analysis”) under the title “Torrent of Lies Redefines Political Norms.”

Doesn’t that sound like a hard-charging rerun of 2016? Nothing ever seems to change from the paper that gaudily proclaimed under Trump that “The Truth Is More Important Now Than Ever.”

You can point and laugh, since The New York Times refused to admit that Hunter Biden’s laptop full of corruption details was authentic until 2022, and then it acknowledged reality in a story on page A-20, in paragraph 23. It was buried, almost like an unmarked grave.

Chief White House correspondent Peter Baker’s editorial bubbled over with contempt for how many lies Trump told in the first 300 seconds of an interview with Tucker Carlson on Halloween. “Public appearances by Mr. Trump throughout this year’s campaign have been an Alice-in-Wonderland trip through the political looking glass, a journey into an alternate reality often belied by actual reality.”

Baker thinks it’s amusing that Trump will sell his administration as the greatest ever seen in American history. Baker can’t imagine anyone thinks he and his journalist wife Susan Glasser and his journalist friends sound like the exact opposite. They have sold Trump’s administration as the most horrendous years America has ever seen.

Every American who pays even a moment’s attention to American politics knows that Trump exaggerates wildly and egotistically, selling himself like he’s closing another real-estate deal. Everything is the best or the worst ever. Everyone loads that into their political calculus. But Democrat-coddling journalists act perpetually shocked, like they’re all starring in “50 First Dates” and forget every night how Trump operates.

What’s really shocking here is how the major media pretend that the Democrats are dramatically more honest, like 10 times more honest. Set apart on page A-16 is their New York Times analysis of candidate speeches: 64 is the number of false or misleading statements at a typical Trump rally, according to them. By contrast, six is the number of false or misleading statements at a typical rally for Kamala Harris.

The obvious joke is that Trump’s rally speeches can go on for 90 minutes, while Harris is closing out the campaign with 10-minute speeches. So, what’s the minute-by-minute falsehood rate?

Under these stilted numbers is “33 percent,” as in the percentage of registered voters who agree with Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden “did not legitimately win.” The Times can’t acknowledge that this fraction of voters who believe dramatic media suppression of Biden scandal news can translate into “illegitimate” victory. You can accept the result and yet protest the unfair process.

Then the partisanship is underlined by their selected expert. “No one in American politics has ever lied on this scale,” said Bill Adair, a founder of PolitiFact whose new book is titled “Beyond the Big Lie.” The Times left out Adair’s partisan subtitle: “The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”

Republicans could “burn down our democracy” since they lie so much more, maybe 10 times more. Adair is quite candid about how he thinks the Republicans were aggressive liars before Trump, so put the Democrat donkey ears on his head.

Republicans refuse to accept the “norm” that political news must be dominated by people who want the Republicans disparaged and then destroyed — as they identify themselves as nonpartisan truth-tellers. That’s a very large and egotistical lie.

Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the Media Research Center began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.