By Christopher Harper
I spent nearly two years in the Washington news bubble, which became so bad that I left to cover the civil war in Lebanon.
My experience in Washington happened more than 40 years ago, but not much has changed.
Back then, Washington journalists had become part of the city’s elites, bringing down presidents, earning big bucks from book deals, and failing to acknowledge their biases.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 2,000 journalists work in Washington, the highest concentration of reporters in the country. One out of every 30 people in the District of Columbia works in journalism.
A recent study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications revealed a stark lack of political diversity among American journalists, with just 3.4% identifying as Republicans and a significant 36.4% as Democrats.
Simply put, many of those polled lied. Many journalists of my era chose their jobs because they wanted to see change. They spouted the required allegiance to objectivity, fairness, and nonpartisanship. But you also had to present a point of view to stay acceptable to those on the cocktail and dinner circuits.
I worked in Washington during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The group grope was that Carter and his band of Georgians were country rabble and had no business running the country.
The press corps was hell-bent on ensuring he didn’t get a second term. I generally covered the second or third-string Carter f-up stories for Newsweek. It wasn’t hard to find these stories because Carter and his aides didn’t know much about running the federal government.
Back then, the bar talk revolved around how the country could survive a president who wore a sweater during an address to the nation about energy policy.
For the past eight years, the Washington media elite has attacked Trump as a dangerous rube who had no business running the country. Now, in yet another group grope, the journalistic elite, who covered up Biden’s intellectual decline, suddenly realized the current president isn’t up to snuff.
I hope the nation realizes President Biden was not the only loser in last week’s debate. The Washington media should also be blamed for allowing him to hide his weaknesses.
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