How Bias Erodes Trust in the Free Press
By Darrell Lee
A free and trusted press stands as a foundational pillar of a functioning democracy, tasked with the sacred duty of holding power to account, informing the citizenry, and serving as a conduit for unbiased information. Yet, in the fractured landscape of 21st-century America, this vital institution faces a credibility crisis. A growing segment of the American populace, particularly on the center-right, no longer views the mainstream press as an impartial arbiter of truth but as a partisan actor with a discernible liberal bias. This perception is not born from a single grievance but from a pattern of selective outrage, narrative framing, and asymmetrical scrutiny applied to political figures and events. An examination of key periods illustrates this dynamic with clarity: the intense, saturating coverage of Republican President Donald Trump's challenge to the 2020 election and his pardoning of January 6th rioters, contrasted with the conspicuous lack of sustained, investigative reporting on Democratic President Joe Biden's apparent mental decline during his final years in office and the evidence of corruption found on his son's laptop. When further contrasted with the historical handling of President Ronald Reagan's cognitive state, an argument emerges that the modern press, in its zeal to confront one President's threats to democracy, adopted a policy that made it incapable of rigorously investigating another's fitness for office, thereby cementing its reputation for bias and inflicting a wound upon its authority.
The media's coverage of Donald Trump's post-2020 election conduct was, by any measure, an all-consuming firestorm. From November 2020 through the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and beyond, the press correctly identified Trump's persistent, baseless claims of a stolen election as a threat to democratic norms. Major news organizations—from The New York Times and The Washington Post to CNN and NBC—dedicated resources to debunking specific fraud allegations, fact-checking every presidential statement, and documenting the dozens of failed legal challenges. The narrative was clear, consistent, and urgent: a sitting president was propagating a "Big Lie" to subvert the will of the voters and undermine the peaceful transfer of power. This framing was not incorrect; the claims were baseless, and the actions did threaten democratic processes, but its execution revealed a shift from dispassionate reporting to a form of journalistic advocacy.
A moral and declarative tone characterized the coverage. News headlines frequently used words like "lie," "falsehood," and "baseless," abandoning the more circumspect language of the past. Analysts, reporters, and anchors often expressed open alarm and condemnation. This intensity reached its zenith following the January 6th riot. The press documented the violence in detail, investigated the groups involved, and rightly framed the event as an assault on American democracy. Subsequently, as President Trump began to reframe the rioters not as insurrectionists but as "patriots" and "hostages" and later issued pardons for many of them upon his return to office, the media met this with uniform and scathing criticism. The pardons were portrayed, justifiably, as a validation of political violence and an affront to the rule of law.
From a journalistic standpoint, covering these events so intensely was defensible. The actions of the then-president and his supporters were historically significant and dangerous. However, for a large portion of the country, how it was covered, the uniformity of opinion, the near-constant state of alarm, and the blending of reporting with moral judgment confirmed their belief that the press was not just reporting on Trump but actively crusading against him and, by extension, his supporters. They saw a media that had dropped all pretense of objectivity in its singular focus on one political figure's transgressions.
This perception of a biased crusade becomes significant when contrasted with the media's handling of two major issues surrounding President Joe Biden: the evidence of corruption, implicating President Biden on his son Hunter's laptop, and his evident cognitive decline in the final years of his presidency.
The Hunter Biden laptop story, first reported by the New York Post in October 2020, contained emails and other files implying that Hunter Biden leveraged his father's position as Vice President for personal financial gain in Ukraine and China. The story was met not with vigorous investigative curiosity from the mainstream press but with active suppression and dismissal. It was framed as a likely Russian disinformation campaign, a narrative bolstered by a letter from 51 former intelligence officials. Social media platforms took the unprecedented step of blocking the story's dissemination. However, after the election, outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post eventually authenticated the laptop. They confirmed the legitimacy of key files used in an active federal investigation. For many Americans, the media's journey from dismissing the story as foreign propaganda before an election to quietly confirming its authenticity months or years later looked less like journalistic diligence and more like a deliberate effort to protect a preferred candidate from a damaging scandal. The lack of a media firestorm over "Laptopgate" comparable to any number of Trump-era scandals was seen as a glaring double standard.
This perception was compounded by the media's reluctance to engage in sustained, serious reporting on President Biden's fitness for office. Throughout his term, and particularly in his final years, public appearances were increasingly marked by moments of confusion, verbal stumbles, and a discernible physical frailty. These incidents, captured on video and widely circulated, became impossible to ignore. Yet, the response from the same mainstream media outlets that had so relentlessly pursued the Trump story was dramatically different in tone, scope, and urgency.
Instead of launching in-depth investigative reports into the President's fitness, a question of paramount national security and governmental competence, the press broadly adopted a protective, defensive stance. Individual incidents were often phrased as isolated "gaffes," dismissed as the product of a lifelong stutter or ignored altogether. When political opponents or conservative media highlighted these issues, the mainstream press narrative frequently pivoted to covering the accusation rather than investigating the underlying concern. The story became "Republicans Pounce on Biden's Stumble" rather than "Is the President Experiencing Cognitive Decline?" This approach effectively reframed a legitimate question about the head of state's health as a mere partisan attack.
Where Trump's every utterance was parsed for its truthfulness and implications, Biden's moments of confusion were often given the benefit of the doubt or contextualized away. Where pundits and medical professionals openly questioned Trump's mental state, similar public speculation about Biden was labeled as ageist, unfair, or a right-wing smear. The press corps, which had positioned itself as a fearless check on presidential power during the Trump years, seemed to abdicate that role, becoming instead a gatekeeper of acceptable discourse, seemingly motivated by a fear that investigating Biden's health too aggressively would validate his political opponents and destabilize a presidency they viewed as a necessary corrective to the Trump era. This created a credibility vacuum. While the press sought to manage the narrative, a large segment of the public saw the evidence with their own eyes on social media. It drew its own conclusions, viewing the media's unwillingness not as journalistic prudence but as a deliberate effort to protect a political ally.
One must look to Ronald Reagan's second term to find a historical benchmark for the press's handling of a president's cognitive decline. By the mid-1980s, whispers began to circulate in Washington about Reagan's inattentiveness, his reliance on talking points, and instances of memory lapse. Following his halting performance in the first 1984 presidential debate against Walter Mondale, the issue briefly became a public concern.
However, the media's approach in the 1980s differed from its approach to either Trump or Biden. There was a general deference to the office of the presidency and a reluctance to report on the President's health without definitive, on-the-record sources. The concerns remained largely inside-the-beltway chatter and were not the subject of daily, front-page news. There was no 24-hour cable news cycle or viral social media to amplify every slip. The press's self-perception was different; it saw its role as reporting confirmed facts, not speculating on medical conditions. While this discretion can be criticized in hindsight, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, five years after leaving office, leading many to wonder if the signs were present during his presidency; it was born of a journalistic culture of restraint.
Comparing the three cases is revealing. With Reagan, the press exercised a level of discretion that perhaps failed to inform the public adequately but was rooted in a traditional, non-adversarial posture. With Trump, the press abandoned all restraint, adopting a posture of constant, open conflict in the name of defending democracy, thereby conditioning a large part of the public to view it as a partisan entity. When confronted with Biden, this same press, having framed itself as the defender against the dangers of Republican leadership, found itself in a trap of its own making. To apply the same level of intense, critical scrutiny to Biden's cognitive fitness and family's ethical controversies that it used to Trump's democratic fitness would have been to give ammunition to the very political forces against which it had defined itself. The result was a journalistic failure of a different kind, not of overzealousness but of avoidance. It failed to apply a consistent standard of scrutiny to leaders of both parties.
This double standard is the corrosive acid that dissolves public trust. For millions of Americans, the evidence is clear: the press relentlessly investigated every facet of a Republican president they opposed, often with a moralizing tone, while actively protecting a Democratic president they favored by downplaying or ignoring serious and visible concerns about his fitness for office and potential ethical lapses within his family. They see the vigorous coverage of the January 6th pardons as a "tragedy for democracy" while viewing the failure to investigate Biden's decline or the laptop story as an equally important, though quieter, tragedy for journalism.
The argument is not that these issues are morally equivalent. A president actively seeking to overturn an election, potential corruption involving a president's family, and a president experiencing age-related decline are distinct phenomena with different implications. However, the role of the press should be consistent: to rigorously, fearlessly, and impartially investigate and report on any issue that seriously impacts presidential fitness, ethical integrity, and the republic's health. When the press chooses to become a player, adopting a mission to "save democracy" from one side, it loses the credibility required to hold the other side accountable. It begins to look like another political team, and its pronouncements are received not as objective facts but as partisan messaging.
The free press has arrived at a moment of crisis, not because of external attacks, but because of its own demonstrated inconsistencies. The contrast between the relentless, crusading coverage of Donald Trump's challenges to democratic norms and the quiet, protective circling around Joe Biden's evident cognitive decline and family controversies provides a powerful, tangible example for millions who believe a liberal bias guides the institution. While historical comparisons to the Reagan era show how journalistic norms have shifted, the modern disparity reveals a press that has become so enmeshed in the political conflict that it applies different standards of inquiry based on the political party of the subject. It has squandered its most precious asset: the trust of a broad cross-section of the American people. Restoring that trust is not a simple task; it requires a return to the first principles of dispassionate inquiry, a consistent application of scrutiny to all sides, and a recognition that its ultimate duty is not to save the country from a particular political outcome but to provide the citizenry with the credible, verified information it needs to save itself. It is not just what the press investigates and reports upon but also what they choose not to report. Without this course correction, the press risks becoming permanently relegated to just another partisan voice, a tragic outcome for an institution designed to be democracy's indispensable guardian.
Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, artistic, societal, and historical events. He splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, scuba diving, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.