Media should be fair to Trump, too

How do you know you’re reading news and not propaganda?

If it sounds too good or evil to be true, it’s probably propaganda.

If it is important and urgent, you’re probably going to see it in more than one publication or broadcast medium. Luckily, online media makes that easy, these days.

You have to be careful when perhaps the best funded and most easily accessed current information outlets are almost unashamedly putting out propaganda and calling it journalism.

Unfortunately, this is also a time when even the most reliable of our bastions of serious news demonstrate a vendetta against our current president.

Old-line media are trumpeting an apparently grave threat against Republicans and an almost-certain reversal of Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate in races this year.

They cite President Donald Trump’s apparent unpopularity in the polls. His approval percentages are in the 40s, the old-line media keep saying.

If that’s true, why are Republican candidates campaigning on their loyalty to the president, and why does it seem to be working for them, except when they are criminally neglectful mining executives and pedophiles?

I really don’t see the Democratic landslides that the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post are predicting.

In fact, it’s hard to find credible Democratic party candidates on the national level.

And where is that story?

Trump and the Republicans have now become the party of our blue-collar workforce. He has said he will bring back better times for them.

He’s working on it in his own way, whether or not it is succeeding, and that should be acknowledged.

It would be refreshing to read more non-disparaging news coverage of the developments that resulted in Trump’s election and more uncritical acknowledgment of Trump’s continued favor in the nation’s midsection.

That is, more statements that merely acknowledge the facts of Trump’s ascendancy without the next paragraphs that begin, “But, this loyalty overlooks...” Or “This loyalty persists despite...”

Yes, the other side belongs in news stories, but not presented in a way that obviously gives the other version more credibility.

The old-line media even seem to be looking for ways to belittle the possible monumental achievement of bringing peace and stability to the Korean peninsula.

A mountain that seems to have collapsed because of nuclear tests might have more to do with North Korea’s willingness to talk than Trump’s schoolboy taunts.

Trump’s belligerence, however, may have played a role in what may become a peaceful agreement to disagree between the two Koreas. Maybe you have to act like a thug to deal with one.

This should be acknowledged without the “but” that inevitably follows.

I am not a Trump supporter, but I am a supporter of a free and open press.

I worry, however, when pure propaganda acquires more credibility among key audiences than reporting based on factuality and an honest effort to measure urgency and importance.

My concern is heightened when I see old-line media seemingly rising to the bait of “fake news” bellowing by abandoning any semblance of objectivity in their determination of what is news about an antagonistic president and how it should be reported.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

stevenmhansen

@plateautel.net