The State of Our . . . Journalism

The State of the Union speech is an effective annual exercise to measure how journalists feel about a long speech on national TV by Donald Trump. They hate it intensely, like most children hate broccoli. They would like to scrape that steaming plate into the garbage.

The New York Times published a front-page editorial by White House reporter Katie Rogers — lamely labeled as "News Analysis." It came under the headline "Casting Democrats as Villains, Trump Produces a Spectacle." You can sense their outrage. Nobody should darkly cast Democrats as villains, especially the people Democrats relentlessly suggest are authoritarians out to end our democracy, but only after they starve children and close hospitals.

Like a good Democrat, Rogers insisted Republicans find themselves in a "politically treacherous moment," while Democrats are "seeing polling moving their way" and "remain confident about the midterm elections." The usual midterm election trends should inspire confidence, as well as all the partisan "news" products.

Liberal outlets sent out their pollsters to find that Trump has "gone too far" on immigration, taken the country in "the wrong direction" and has all the wrong "priorities." Their pollsters are always going to keep the "vibes" high for Democrats and paint dark clouds over the Republicans in any election season. They tried in 2024, but the people ruined it for the pollsters.

They also pile on Republicans with their so-called independent fact-checkers. They pounce relentlessly on Trump, aerobically implying to the public that you can't believe a word Trump says about anything. They're trying to put the oomph behind this Jimmy Fallon joke: "Trump's speech focused on his major accomplishments, and when those eight seconds were up, he just riffed for an hour and a half."

The New York Times and the Associated Press published "fact checks" of Trump before his speech was even made available to the public. When it was over, Times "fact-checker" Linda Qiu and other Times staffers posted 29 fact checks about Trump, and they used 20 of them to fill up an entire page of the paper. Online, they had just one note on Virginia Gov. Abby Spanberger, who was assigned the Democrat response — but she was touted as correct.

Overall, I found in a quick review of the "fact checks" after Trump's speech there were 123 for the president and just four for Spanberger — and all four of those ruled the new governor as factual. PolitiFact has featured only six fact checks on Spanberger over her career, and only one was a False. Aren't they nice?

Democrats feel free to unload attack lines that are untrue on their face, like this one from Spanberger's rebuke: "Our President told us tonight that we are safer because these agents arrest mothers and detain children." Did Trump literally say, Wwe're safe because ICE agents arrest mothers and detain children"? No. But everything is fair game when a Democrat is boiling up rhetoric.

Your "independent fact-checkers" say nothing when Trump is compared to Hitler and the Republicans are compared to the Nazis. Democrats yelled from the House floor that Trump "killed Americans" who interfered with ICE, and no one objected. They exploded in outrage when a Republican congressman yelled, "You lie" at President Barack Obama at the 2009 State of the Union, but "you killed Americans" is considered fair.

This latest address to Congress underlines the elitist media should not be considered a reliable source in describing which actors in politics are practicing honesty and decency, promoting unity and a bipartisan spirit. They offer none of those qualities in their work.

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