The media has to do better than this

If journalists want to build back squandered public trust, there can be no free passes for Joe Biden and the Democrats

President Biden.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

For the past four years, the country's leading mainstream media outlets — among them The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN — treated the Trump administration as an opponent and even an outright enemy.

This was fully justified — and not just because the president constantly lashed out at these organizations and individual journalists by name, accusing them of pedaling "fake news," of making up sources and facts out of whole cloth, and of putting their pursuit of ratings ahead of the good of the country. It was also justified because Donald Trump was an unprecedentedly inept and mendacious president who actively encouraged and rewarded corruption and lying. This required that the press remain on full alert for the entirety of the Trump presidency, ready and eager to file stories that exposed all manner of misdeeds.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.