Since the election I have noticed an interesting change in the editorial columns in my local newspaper, the Connecticut Post. The paper, a part of the Hearst chain, had a consistent policy of opposition to President Trump, a policy dutifully followed by all of its columnists.
Not one good word about the President or his Administration was allowed to be published not only during the election campaign, but throughout the past four years. The achievements of his administration were routinely ignored or suppressed. For example, when a huge contract was given to Connecticut’s Electric Boat company to build new submarines, credit was given to a local Democratic congressman but none to President Trump. Of course, not one of the columnists even mentioned this year’s peace accords between Israel and its Moslem neighbors all of which were brokered by the Trump administration.
The paper is a champion of diversity but there has been no diversity of opinion among its columnists or editorial writers. No matter what their race or gender, they were all highly partisan Democratic supporters, even to the point of outright hatred of President Trump. Like many, they refused to recognize the legitimacy of the President’s election in 2016, and consistently refused to even call him President. He could only be referred to as Trump.
After the election, however, some political commentators were apparently left off the leash. Just the other day, one regular columnist who never could bring himself to even write a good word about the President, or name one of his accomplishments wrote the following in praise of the development of a vaccine to treat the coronavirus.
We are about to become beneficiaries of one of the most stunning accomplishments in the history of medical science. In the space of a year, we’ve identified a disease, named it, sequenced its genome, learned about treating it and—it seems—made several types of vaccine that work against it.
Earlier in his essay he did refer to the Trump administration and Operation Warp Speed but still could not bring himself to name President Trump or give him any credit for engineering “one of the most stunning accomplishments in the history of medical science.” He could only say that “we” did it, as if the extraordinary combination of government and private industry was a collective effort in which the President played a negligible role. Still, it was a startling admission that something had actually been accomplished by the President and his team in the past four years.
Earlier, a black columnist, who also could not bring himself to say anything good about the President, conveniently waited until after the election to blame Connecticut Democratic multi-millionaire politicians like Senator Richard Blumenthal and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro for their failure to really help black people during their long tenure in office.
In a similar fashion, another columnist waited until after the election to bemoan the fact that Connecticut had become even more of a one-party state than before. The state, one of the bluest in the country, had become even bluer as the Democrats gained more seats in the legislature. Of course, due to the pandemic, there has been no legislature for months and the Democratic Governor uses emergency powers to rule like a dictator. Where has this columnist been? How come he never complained about one-party rule before?
Finally, in an election post-mortem, a female columnist expressed surprise that even one woman could have voted for the misogynistic Trump. She claimed that she did not know even one woman who voted for the President. To her credit she did invite readers to respond, and when a number of women responded with thoughtful reasons, she had the decency to print some of the replies in her next column.
I wonder what these columnists and others like them all over the country will write about once President Trump leaves office? He has provided an incredible amount of material for them. For four years they have willingly participated in every effort to remove the President from office. Who or what will they dare to criticize and condemn in the Biden administration? Who will even bother to read or listen to their platitudes about the new administration? Recent pre-inaugural press conferences with Joe Biden have demonstrated how easily the media can shift from attack dogs to lap dogs.
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