The Guardian is among the most Left-leaning in its coverage. Katharine Viner, its editor-in-chief, has been running a public appeal for donations since Donald Trump won reelection, under the heading "How the Guardian will stand up to four more years of Donald Trump."
Viner's complaints about Trump have been circulating in legacy media circles for nearly a decade: Trump is authoritarian. He lies. Trump led Jan 6 insurrection/riot/whatever-you-call-it. Trump has called the media an enemy of the people. Trump calls legitimate journalism “fake news” and he is a direct threat to the freedom of the press.
Viner should go back and look at the poll results when Americans rejected the Left's characterization of the president-elect. Trump racked up impressive victories across the country, many of which are historic. He won all seven battleground states, and in reclaiming the presidency, Trump became the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to win non-consecutive terms. Trump also won the popular vote, which no GOP candidate has done since George W. Bush in 2004.
His diverse base includes union workers, Hispanics, Blacks, and young voters. The red states became redder. Ohio, which was Trump +6 in 2016 and Trump +8 in 2020, became Trump +14 this time. In Texas and Florida, he won by 14 points. Trump's coattails were so broad that he helped down-ballot Senate races, as Ted Cruz (TX) comfortably beat Colin Allred, and Rick Scott (FL) held on to his seat. In Ohio, Bernie Moreno of the GOP unseated Democratic star Sherrod Brown by four points. Republican Jim Justice in West Virginia needed no help from Trump as he comfortably wrested retiring Democrat Joe Manchin's seat, 69-27. The United States Senate changed hands to GOP control, 53-47.
None of these facts have changed the Guardian's view of Trump. Worse, in an editorial last week, the Guardian openly advocated for regulating digital media.
The newspaper's justification begins with comments made by former President Barack Obama in November 2020, shortly after that disputed election put Joe Biden in the White House. In his professorial style, Obama observed that America risked entering "an epistemological crisis," meaning that the country was about to examine the nature, origin, and limits of the American political experience.
The Guardian editorial translated Obama's comments to mean that he was talking about media fragmentation and polarization: different segments of society exist in discrete information spaces, and arguments are no longer drawn from a common reservoir of facts, shared reality, and foundation of truth. "Then, by definition, the marketplace of ideas doesn't work," he said. "And by definition, our democracy doesn't work."
The editorial cited the dominance of X and Musk's megaphone and concluded: The case for a better-regulated digital realm has to be made with growing urgency. The alternative will be to see Mr. Obama's forebodings about a broken marketplace of ideas that inhibits functional democracy realized with ever more sinister effect.
The Guardian's argument has two issues. First, the media has followed Obama's advice since he left office in 2016: to coordinate coverage and create his "common reservoir of facts." But the initiative was not undertaken to make democracy work. Building that reservoir meant that the Left would recite on a 24-hour basis a narrative that Trump was unworthy of the presidency and sow seeds of doubt in the American voter.
The so-called "media fact checks" went into overdrive during the Trump presidency, citing nearly all of his statements as false. The same media fact-checkers stayed silent throughout the Biden-Harris administration, never reporting that Biden was unfit to serve throughout his presidency because of his lack of mental cognition. Worse, the fact-checkers hid facts from Americans, including promoting an overly optimistic take on America's problems (crime, illegal immigration, the economy, and foreign wars).
When it came to Trump, contrary to Obama's statement, facts did not matter at all, and Obama himself was at the root of many of those lies, such as the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax his administration launched on the 2016 Trump campaign or the Hunter Biden laptop story that the Left suppressed to tilt the presidential election to Biden. [We argued last month that despite the dishonest attacks on Trump, he may have won in 2020 after all]. In effect, Obama's diktat to the Left became a focused campaign to malign Trump as a demon, a Nazi, and a fascist - and lies were ok to support this larger goal. The effort gained official status when the Biden DOJ unleashed 34 federal cases against Trump, and numerous Democrat-led cities, counties, and states attempted to take Trump out of electoral contention altogether.
The problem was that this campaign failed miserably as the average American never bought into the Left's rage and Trump hatred. And it brings us to the second factor where the Guardian is fundamentally wrong.
Obama's "common reservoir of facts, shared reality, and foundation of truth," was indeed resurrected when Elon Musk bought Twitter, fired over 3,000 employees in its Trust and Safety department, and eliminated all censorship of speech. Musk's team created X's algorithm for free speech by following Musk's rule: "If someone you don't like says something that you don't like - and that statement is legal in the country where it is said - that statement is permissible on X." Contrary to the Guardian's lofty assertion that media organizations alone are arbiters of the truth, it was citizen journalism and vibrant, free-wheeling debate in those "discrete information spaces," on X and New Media that educated the average American voter about the truth that the liberal media had held from us all.
Misinformation is an issue in digital media as it has been an issue in all forms of communication for 3,000 years. However, the response to misinformation is not regulation; instead, it is to subject misinformation to "Community Notes" corrections and attack misinformation with the correct information.
