The suicide of the press, media double-denial on Joes decline and other commentary

President Trump’s move “to restrict public funds to NPR and PBS” is “is a moment the media should use for long-overdue self-reflection,” explains Jonathan Turley at The Hill.“The damage done to the press in the last decade” is “almost entirely self-inflicted,” as it dropped “the touchstones of neutrality and objectivity” to become an “echo chamber that amplifies liberal and often partisan Democratic talking points.”Now “readers and viewers have left mainstream media in an exodus,” yet “editors and reporters continue to saw at the branch upon which they are sitting.”NPR, unworried “that its shrinking audience was overwhelmingly white, liberal and affluent,” assumed “it could make the vast majority of the country, which does not listen to its programming, help pay for its programming.”Now, like the rest of the media, it must “choose between sustaining its bias or expanding its audience.”As some in the press admit “mainstream media’s failure to swiftly cover former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline,” notes Reason’s Robby Soave, former NBC host Chuck Todd still insists “this stupid premise” is “a manufactured right-wing premise to stain the media,” arguing that the pundits who “carried water for Joe Biden” were “not journalists,” but “former strategists.”Soave pushes back: “Mainstream media didn’t just ignore the story: They adopted the framing of Biden’s defenders and pushed the idea that conservatives were making it all up.”“Biden staffers, strategists, and Democratic Party leaders” may have led the cover-up, but “much of the media went along for the ride.” The US “military is seeing its biggest recruitment surge in more than a decade,” cheers Rob Maness at the Association of Mature American Citizens, “and it’s no mystery why”: After Team Biden spent years turning “our armed forces into a woke Marxist social experiment,” President Trump’s “bold, unapo...