Politics

CNN’s Dylan Byers admits: Reporters tell progressive story as defined by Obama and Hillary

On Friday, CNN’s Dylan Byers admitted something many of us already knew — reporters tend to tell their stories from a progressive “arc of history” as defined by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“There’s this conversation that’s happening among people following the news industry, which is how can we bridge the sort of gap between all of those conservatives who don’t trust the media, and get them to start knowing that, you know, we’re acting in good faith, with good intentions? Maybe you can’t, because they’re not even listening. From the second, it’s not as though they’re reading the article and considering it, or listening the audio and considering it. They’re just not paying attention to it, because  they don’t trust us,” he said during a discussion on the recent Montana special election.

“And this, by the way, you look at the tapes of Trump there. Two things have happened. One, over the course of several decades, the conservatives have done a masterful job at capitalizing [on] the waning trust in media and using it to their advantage. But a second thing has happened, too, which is, on occasion, more than the media would like to admit, we have not told the story of conservative Americans, disenfranchised Americans, who believe that they are losing their country,” he added. “The story we have largely been telling is a story that is more or less in step with the arc of history as defined by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It does not mean we favor them to win. It just means that sort of vision of a progressive future, a global future, and that is not one that resonates with so many conservative American voters.”

“And so there is this chasm, and no one exploited as well as Donald Trump did, and no one made it as violent and aggressive and sinister as Donald Trump did, and that laid the foundation for the sorts of incidents that happened saw last night,” he said in an apparent attempt to link Trump to the incident between Greg Gianforte and Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs.

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Writing at the Right Scoop, blooger SooperMexican said: “I mean you have to hand it to him that he at least admits most reporters are stuck telling the story of the progressive future as envisioned by Obama and Hillary – that is an insight that most in the media seem physiologically incapable of making.”

Except, Newsbusters’ Tim Graham added, “Byers is half-admitting it, that they tilt ever so slightly toward their ‘arc of history’ bias, but it doesn’t mean they favor Democrats. That they tilt away from ‘telling the story’ of conservative Americans, when in reality they demonize conservative Americans with all the ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ you can list. And worst of all, Byers says conservatives have ‘capitalized on waning trust’ of the liberal media, instead of admitting that conservatives have exposed the liberal media, reported on and captured the liberal media inside their bubble.”

Here’s video of Byers’ comments:

There’s more to this, however.  Byers is right that conservatives don’t trust the media, but that distrust has been building for years — it just didn’t explode in 2016.  Back in the 1990s, I ran for city council in Riverside and saw bias in the local reporting of that race.  The bias has only gotten worse in the years since, to the point that CNN is now regarded as the least trusted name in cable news.

Again — that didn’t happen in a vacuum and it didn’t happen overnight.  In 2016, we saw an activist media overtly advancing one candidate — Hillary Clinton — over the other.  Worse yet, they were completely unapologetic as they boldly accepted the role of Democrat Party propagandists.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that things will get any better…

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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