NewsBusters Time Machine

For decades, the liberal media establishment showed open hostility toward conservative powerhouse William F. Buckley, as well as for the broader conservative movement he helped launch.

The media have exhibited compassion regarding President Biden's pardon for his son, Hunter, but 17 years ago, angry journalists railed against the “travesty of justice” after President Bush merely commuted the prison sentence of former White House aide “Scooter” Libby.

The media are offering wall-to-wall condemnations of President-elect Trump’s choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. From the NewsBusters’ archives, here’s a quick recap of how the media lost their minds the last time Trump canned one FBI director in favor of another.

It was twenty years ago this week that CBS News announced Dan Rather would be leaving as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Anyone watching Rather over the years couldn’t help but notice how he relentlessly twisted the news to help Democrats and liberals, while punishing Republicans and conservatives.

Much as we’re seeing today, in 2016 liberal reporters and commentators savaged Donald Trump’s first group of appointees as “radical” and “racist” “ignoramuses” who “disdain the missions of their assigned agencies.”

Three years ago, the liberal media trumpeted how a new Georgia law would “make it harder to vote,” “restrict voting rights” or amounted to “voter suppression.” This week’s record turnout showed those claims were utterly wrong.

Even after all of the votes have been cast, network correspondents present the results through the lens of their own biases — cheering when a Democrat wins, and snarling about imaginary dirty tricks when the voters back a Republican.

Thanks to the outsized role that “the media” — that’s the news media, entertainment media, and social media — play in our national discourse, the vacuous and vulgar pronouncements of left-wing celebrities are widely promoted as if they were actually important contributions to the political dialogue.

At this point in the 2016 election, the liberal media were sure that their months of hostile negative coverage had succeeded in destroying Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidency.

For the four years of his presidency, the media savaged Trump’s immigration policies as “cruel,” “evil,” “inhumane,” “torture” and “profoundly racist.” Yet polls show Trump besting Harris by wide margins on the issue, suggesting the Biden administration’s abject incompetence has been more persuasive than years of media rhetoric.

One year ago (October 7, 2023), Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israeli communities and murdered nearly 1,200 individuals, including babies. Yet the media quickly shifted to deploring Israel’s military campaign to remove Hamas’s capability to ever commit such an atrocity in the future.

Eighteen years ago tonight, ABC News revealed that Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley had sent lewd text messages to underage congressional pages. ABC, CBS and NBC spent a huge amount of airtime over the following weeks trumpeting the scandal, the idea being that Foley’s bad behavior could bring down Republicans all across the country.

Adding to the stakes of who wins in November, the big issue in 2025 will be the expiration of the Trump tax cuts. A look back at the media’s performance seven years ago, as the reform package moved through Congress, shows the liberal media’s raging hostility to lower tax rates.

Four years ago this week, the media elite despaired that the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would shift the balance of power on the Supreme Court to the right.