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Joel S. Hirschhorn

On almost a daily basis I see the unbounded bias of the mainstream media against the Trump Administration. It is morally corrupt and, worse yet, criminally unpatriotic. It is clearly an attempt by liberals and Democrats to undo the legitimate election of President Trump. What I saw the other day was the epitome of this media bias. It was when CNN’s Jim Acosta assailed the new Trump immigration policy by asserting that it was biased in favor of English speakers from the UK and Australia. Why was this particular assertion so clearly utterly stupid and wrong?

At the time I saw this press room interaction between Acosta and White House policy advisor Stephen Miller I was on a cruise. Anyone who has been on a cruise in past decades knows first hand that Acosta was totally and intentionally biased in trying to convince Americans that English speaking as a requirement, among others, for getting into the USA was biased against countless countries other than the two he stated. Why? Because on virtually every cruise ship the many hundreds of officers and staff come from a great many nations other than the USA, the UK and Australia. In fact, virtually none come from those three. What do all of the countless thousands cruise workers have in common? They all speak English.

On my most recent cruise large numbers of cruise workers came from, for example, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Croatia, Russia, Italy, Myanmar, Honduras, Poland and many, many more.

Why would a supposedly informed, major CNN newsman say such a stupid thing? Is he actually uninformed that people worldwide learn English as a second language? Has he never met many people from various countries who speak English, including – are you ready for this – the many foreign news people he regularly interacts with?

It turns out that giving a priority for English speaking immigrants for green cards is not really counter to recent reality as reported after the Acosta fiasco:

According to the census data, a full 11.3 percent of recent immigrants speak only English. Another 32.9 percent speak English “very well.” Nearly twenty-two percent report that they speak English “well.” In aggregate, then, two-thirds of recently arrived immigrants speak English well or better.

Looked at from the other side, only around 13 percent of recent immigrants speak no English at all, while 21.3 percent rate as speaking English “not well.” This suggests that the number of non-English speaking immigrants who enter under current law is far smaller than Acosta apparently believes.

Like MSNBC, CNN reveals its anti-Trump bias in virtually everything it does. It is an insult for the many millions of Americans who voted for Trump or who silently support his policies. True, I, like many of those, regularly find many of Trump’s statements and actions repulsive and counterproductive to his policy agenda. At those moments, however, I remind myself how awful I would feel if Hillary Clinton was president.

This is the ugly media reality. CNN and many other news outlets have no shame, no honesty, no objectivity, no respect for American democracy, and no respect for the millions of Americans who rejected, for very good reasons, Clinton. We need a national boycott of all the media that constantly show their media bias. They make a mockery of the much loved freedom of the press hallmark of our democracy. In the face of such media bias, those media undermine freedom of the press, which should not be seen as a license to blatantly and incessantly abandon objectivity and fairness in order to spread propaganda serving their political preferences.

Freedom of the press has become, all too sadly, cover for undoing our democratic electoral process. Shame on Acosta and all of his many biased media hacks selling themselves as legitimate reporters, analysts and commentators. The lack of credibility for the new media is a logical response to the biased behavior so clearly evidenced by Acosta’s nonsense. Even Americans who do not support Trump should be appalled by rampant media bias.

[Joel S. Hirschhorn was a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association; he has authored five nonfiction books, including Delusional Democracy – Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government.]

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