The New York Times considered it news the other day that Sean Hannity gives advice to Donald Trump, whom he has publicly and repeatedly endorsed. The tut-tutting tone of the piece, coming from a newspaper as baldly biased as the Times, is comic. […] It is a newspaper of, by, and for liberals, yet the author of the column, Jim Rutenberg, acts like he is speaking from Olympian heights of neutrality.
He writes: “Mr. Hannity told me his support for Mr. Trump makes him ‘more honest’ than mainstream reporters who hide their biases. It turns out even ‘honesty’ is a relative concept these days. For some people more than others.” Well, no one would know that better than the liberal partisans at the New York Times. As Jeff Lord points out, Rutenberg also ignores numerous examples of liberal editors and journalists who became Democrat advisers.
In a previous piece, Rutenberg, ever the sophisticated observer, just noticed that liberal reporters find it hard to cover Trump according to journalistic conventions. “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that,” he writes. “You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.” Uncomfortable territory? That’s been their exclusive beat for decades. […]
The Times feels entitled to play ombudsman to other media outlets while not listening to its own. In July, New York Times “public editor” Liz Spayd criticized the newspaper for its liberal bias. New to the job, she said that she had already been bombarded with complaints from conservatives and that the paper’s indifference to those complaints struck her as “poison.” She said that she had asked reporters about liberal bias at the paper and that “mostly I was met with a roll of the eyes.” Spayd referred to the comments section of the paper’s website as a “giant liberal echo chamber” and questioned the paper’s front-page editorial last December in favor of gun control.
