Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.

Reasonable minds agree that a free and sometimes adversarial press is a must for a free society. But this state of grace requires a trade-off that must be honored by a national press that is fair to both sides, or they deserve to lose their usefulness and credibility.

Now, we see how the mighty press has fallen. The media reports through a glass darkly. They no longer know the difference between news and opinion, the ruination of journalism. They cannot credibly claim objectivity when most of them are shamelessly biased, self-protective, and subservient to the left’s agenda—this is because approximately nine of out ten journalists inhabit the political left and 90-92% of them routinely vote for Democrats.

It’s always been that way. A poll by the Freedom Forum in 1995 revealed that 89 percent of Washington-based journalists voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. In a 1985 survey, two-thirds of the press disapproved of Ronald Reagan’s performance, while his public approvals were 56% to 27%; two out of 5 journalists “favored government ownership of corporations”. Distrust of the national media heightened when Tucker Carlson released emails written by liberal journalists in 2008 that showed “hundreds of them were actively working to promote” Obama for president. Further, a scheme existed “to smear Mr. Obama’s critics by labeling them as racist.”

Yes, “Fake news” has become very real. The mainstream media uses fake news to act as an opposition party to Donald Trump and to conservatives generally. Too often, the MSM gets it wrong, they fail to tell the people what’s really going on, they choose to write about issues that make the left look good, and they hide the left’s bad behavior. For example, where was the self-important, “vaunted, pious” MSM when Obama’s Department of Justice minion Eric Holder subpoenaed Fox News reporter James Rosen, labeling him an “aider and abettor and co-conspirator”, and invaded the privacy of a reporter by seizing telephone records and personal emails. Holder should have been fired for that, and the MSM should have blasted Holder into orbit. But they did not.

Fortunately, all this business of the media keeping people at each other’s throats has not gone unnoticed by mainstream Americans, whose trust in the media has sunk to new lows. Late in 2016, the Gallup poll people found that Americans’ trust in the mass media fell to its “lowest point in Gallup’s polling history”, which goes back to 1972. Less than one-third of poll respondents had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the MSM.

An earlier Gallup poll asked Americans how they would rate the “honesty and ethical standards” of people in 22 professions. Nurses had the highest ranking, at 82%. Among the cellar-dwellers near the bottom, at about 20%, were “Newspaper Reporters” and “TV Reporters”.

It’s not only bias, dishonesty is not uncommon in the national media. The New York Times says their polls are “scientific”. Sure they are—scientifically stacking the deck. One infamous poll was taken by the Times in 2009, about the willingness of Americans to pay higher taxes for federal health care. It turned out that the Times skewed the polling by offering the questions to almost twice as many Obama voters as McCain voters. No shock they supported higher taxes. That poll was nothing other than a Times deception.

Inexcusable. A soon as the pollsters learned that far more of the respondents were Obama supporters, they should have thrown out the poll. But the Times ardently favors nationalized health care and a huge federal government. So the con played out.

As Bill O’Reilly has said about the national MSM, “Americans need to wake up and smell the corruption…. No longer can the American media be relied upon to bring us fact-based information.”