Who’s in denial?

Mainstream media reporters continue to charge that President Donald Trump is a state of denial, rejecting any facts he simply doesn’t want to accept.

Scott Pelley opened a recent broadcast of the CBS Evening News by highlighting the president’s claim on Monday about unreported terrorist attacks. Pelley remarked that the president’s statements were “divorced from reality.”

Members of the mainstream media ought to spend some time looking in the mirror.

Overnight, it seems, major media have become interested in facts following eight years of ignoring the misleading statements and even outright lies told by the Obama administration and its liberal allies. The list is long and includes former Sen. Harry Reid’s baseless charge, made from the safety of the Senate floor, against Mitt Romney, who Reid falsely accused of not paying his taxes. When asked about it in an interview, Reid said, “I did what was necessary” to defeat Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Then there were the numerous lies about Obamacare, the glossing over of anti-Semitic statements by Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and the influence of radical leftist thinker Saul Alinsky on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The public’s trust in major media continues to decline. Their denial ensures that decline will continue.

How deep into denial the media have gone and how they refuse to consider what the public thinks of them was again revealed in a Washington Post column by former ABC News Nightline host and current CBS News contributor Ted Koppel.

Koppel, who was always fair and friendly to me when I appeared on his program, correctly states that a democracy depends on facts. The problem is that too many of us can’t agree on the facts because the standard by which truth was once measured has disappeared in our age of relativity. It is an Alice in Wonderland age in which Humpty Dumpty is the prophet: “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”

This is the media’s fault line. Koppel writes:

“There may be some temporary political advantage to be gained by tearing down public confidence in critical, nonpartisan journalism, but it is only temporary. At some point or another, everyone needs professional finders of facts.”

The liberal commentator and former CNN host, Piers Morgan, is no fan of Donald Trump, or of modern American journalism. Appearing Monday night on Tucker Carlson Tonight on the Fox News Channel, Morgan said he recently went through 11 pages of The New York Times. Every story, every editorial, and every column was anti-Trump. Even four letters to the editor were anti-Trump, he said. That’s not “nonpartisan journalism,” that’s bias—or as Morgan put it: “A complete disgrace!”

The public gets it, even if reporters and anchors don’t, or deny their biases.

The notion that the public needs “professional finders of facts” goes beyond bias to hubris. It pretends these “professionals” don’t have a point of view and that they are evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. I defy any mainstream network to name one conservative Republican on its staff with the power to make decisions on what stories are covered and how they are covered. I once asked Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes if she could name a single conservative at CBS News. She couldn’t.

The public’s trust in major media continues to decline. Their denial ensures that decline will continue. If it is a threat to democracy, as Koppel claims, it is a threat of the media’s own making.

Listen to Cal Thomas’ commentary on the Feb. 9 edition of The World and Everything in It.