By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | December 20, 2024
What do a $15 million settlement with ABC News, a Washington, D.C., waitress getting fired, and the Los Angeles Times planning to include a bias meter in its news stories have in common?
They are all welcome signs that the nation is embracing normalcy once again – something that Joe Biden was allegedly going to restore after Donald Trump’s supposedly chaotic years.
Trump’s first term was chaotic, but not because of what he did so much as the four-year hysteria unleashed by his opponents.
Biden, on the other hand, brought true chaos. A tainted election, foreign wars, open borders, runaway inflation, exploding deficits, shortages, censorship, weaponized justice, incompetent leaders and a senile president, two assassination attempts, rising disunity, despair.
But now that the left’s unhinged efforts to silence conservative voices and block Trump’s reelection have been soundly defeated, a return to some semblance of normalcy is actually possible.
ABC News’ settlement – which includes a public apology in addition to the $15 million to settle a defamation case over “journalist” George Stephanopoulos’ repeated assertion that Trump had been found “liable for rape” – is a sign that news media can’t do or say whatever it wants to push an agenda.
That came after two papers refused to endorse Kamala Harris for president because she is so undeniably unsuited for the office, causing some allegedly neutral reporters and editors at those papers to quit.
More recently, the owner of the Los Angeles Times’ spiked an editorial he deemed unfairly critical of Trump’s Cabinet picks and announced that Times news stories would be accompanied by an AI-powered bias meter rating. As CNN reports, “(Patrick) Soon-Shiong said major publishers have so far failed to adequately separate news and opinion, which he suggested ‘could be the downfall of what now people call mainstream media.'”
That also has the left freaking out. How dare a publisher ask journalists to do what they promise – report the news – and not propagandize their readers.
Then there’s the case of the employee at a Washington, D.C., restaurant who was fired after she was quoted in the Washingtonian magazine saying she “personally would refuse to serve any person” she could identify as working for the Trump administration.
For eight years, this person would have been celebrated as a hero. During Trump’s first term, prominent Democrats such as Rep. Maxine Waters urged open-minded and tolerant leftists to harass Trump administration employees. “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” Waters said, “And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
This time around, however, the owner of the restaurant issued a statement saying that the server’s remarks were “inappropriate, hostile, intolerant, and unacceptable. This staff member does NOT speak for us as a restaurant.” (Such language used to be limited only to those who violated the woke canon.)
It would be another sign of a return to normalcy if public establishments were to go back to doing what they’re supposed to do – serve the public, rather than openly discriminate against political opponents.
Corporate CEOs who had decided to play politics and appease the left for eight years are now giving Trump his due deference, just as they normally do to any president. If companies abandon politics and focus on making great products, that would be a return to normalcy, too.
Trump’s promise to cut the size and scope of the federal government and dismantle the administrative state would also mark a return to normalcy – at least the normalcy that the founders had envisioned of a limited federal government where elected leaders, not faceless bureaucrats, made laws.
As an added bonus to all this, the country won’t have to endure the freak shows Biden staged on the White House lawn.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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