Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism

Sinclair Broadcast Group journalist Attkisson continues her attack on media bias (after The Smear) in this unpersuasive polemic. Contending that news outlets “filter information on the front end to ensure that only the ‘correct’ view is presented in the first place,” Attkisson details her battles in the 1990s and early 2000s against CBS News producers who killed her stories because, as she sees it, they didn’t fit a “preconceived narrative’’ about “the push to insert religion into public schools” or presidential candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. Attkisson’s examples of “anti-Trump bias” in the media include an April 2020 Politico report alleging that the president owed the Bank of China tens of millions of dollars (the loan had been sold to a U.S. real estate firm in 2012) and claims that Trump flip-flopped on the length of the border wall (“[He] had never wavered” on saying the wall wasn’t needed where natural barriers already existed, Attkisson writes). In other instances, Attkisson castigates news outlets for views expressed on their opinion pages, and claims, without much evidence, that there is “a well-funded, well-organized effort” to smear her and other “media figures” as “coronavirus doubters.” This one-sided critique doesn’t land its punches. (Nov.)