Far after the American media establishment denounced former President Donald Trump, 81-year-old venerable emeritus American journalist Ted Koppel questioned how the journalism industry crossed into the opinion side to denounce Trump’s reelection bid. Koppel has no problem with in journalists taking sides, what he has a problem with are respected broadcast and print outlets throwing their weight to one political candidate or another, in this case against former President Donald Trump. “I’m terribly concerned that when you talk about the New York Times these days, where you talk about the Washington Post these days,” Koppel said. “We’re not talking about the New York Times 50 years ago. We are not talking about the Washington Post 50 years ago. We’re talking about organization that I believe has, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States,” Koppel said.
Koppel was especially offended watching the U.S. media actively work to defeat Trump’s presidency, throwing its weight behind specious stories emerging from pure partisan politics that branded Trump as a Russian asset. Without mentioning names, Koppel was concerned about former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fake “Steele Dossier,” used by the former Obama White House, FBI, CIA and National Security Agency [NSA] to launch fraudulent investigations into the former president,, filtering its way into House Democrats that spent years convinced that Trump was a Russian asset, detrimental to the United States. Koppel spoke to News Nation’s Dan Abrams, who, for years, worked as a journalist hack for MSNBC routinely denouncing Trump during his four years in office. Now that Abrams is at a less partisan outlet, he’s trying to make amends.
Once news organizations cross the line into opinion, they fail to report facts, only giving biased opinions. Once Trump made the “fake news” part of national dialogue, too many news organizations took the gauntlet, especially news organizations that lost credibility in the 2016 presidential election. Hillary lost the election despite having every endorsement form U.S. broadcast and print outlets. When voters spoke Nov. 8, 2016 handing the presidency to Trump, the news media lost credibility, vowing to make Trump’s life miserable during his four years in office. Getting President Joe Biden was the ultimate goal of the U.S. media in 2020, despite knowing that the aging candidate might have problems commanding the White House. Since taking office, the media continued to makes excuses for what are glaring issues managing the presidency. Biden’s approval ratings are at an abysmal 41.6%.
Koppel told Abrams he thought opinion should be kept to the opinion pages, out of mainstream journalism. “I think opinion belongs on the opinion page. That’s why they call it the op-ed section. That’s where the opinion pieces are, the columns. , that’s where the editorials are and that’s where it belongs. I don’t like seeing opinion being expressed on the front page of a great newspaper,” Koppel told Abrams. Koppel didn’t begin to show how elected officials, for Obama administration officials, used their positions to express extreme prejudice toward Trump. Looking at the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, it’s the same partisan bias that Koppel sees in major U.S. newspapers. Elected officials have used their positions to express biased opinions against Trump and his White House officials. Abrams told Koppel that things were different for some reason when it came to Trump.
Koppel found out that most journalists thought they had a right to cross the line when it came to Trump, agreeing with politicians that Trump represented a clear-and-present danger to the United States. Once the George Floyd police murder took place May 25, 2020, the anti-racist community went wild branding Trump a dangerous racist and white supremacist. Koppel didn’t like watching his profession violate every known ethical journalist standard simply because they thought Trump was a menace, for whatever reason. “I just wish some of the best journalists that I have seen over the past 50 years. I just wish they wouldn’t step into that category. . . . It bothers me when I see them losing some of the criteria that always used to keep a wall between opinion and new coverage,” Koppel told Abrams. Watching biased in journalism must disgust Koppel who spent years defending the profession.
Koppel’s fighting a losing battle talking to Abrams about preserving ethical journalism as it once was. Whatever happened to the line between opinion and journalism, it’s clear that objective journalism doesn’t exist in today’s world. Broadcast outlets like CNN have become tied to the Democrat Party, no longer engaged in objective journalism. “Do you feel that way about anybody else in politics?” asked Koppel. “Are we going to start picking up our morning newspaper to see who is in and who is out, in terms of the news coverage? Again, there’s a place for that in the op-ed section. I don’t like it on thee front page,” Koppel said, true to his journalistic standards. But the world of journalism has changed since Koppel was a mainstream broadcast journalist. Journalists today don’t have the ethical sense to know when they’ve crossed the line into opining about the news.
