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EXCLUSIVE: Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer has authored a new book aimed at exposing how mainstream media outlets keep getting the news wrong and how their newsroom’s lack of ideological diversity helped create a “crisis of confidence for the press.”
Fleischer, the former White House press secretary under former President George W. Bush, says his new book is a reckoning on why the press continues to lose trust, as well as readers and viewers.
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“What the mainstream press covers is too often wrong and what they fail to cover is too often right,” Fleischer said in an interview with Fox News Digital about the forthcoming release of his new book.
Fox contributor Ari Fleischer says most Americans live in a media-created fantasy land.
(Broadside Books)
“Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong – And Just Doesn`t Care” is being published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Thebook’s release date is July 12, 2022, with pre-orders available now.
Fleischer said he cites example after example in his book of bad reporting, with a chapter dedicated to the New York Times and another to CNN.
“What I really do is let reporters hang themselves with their own words,” Fleischer said.
Instead of neutral reporting, journalists went above and beyond to make a case against former President Trump — labeling his statements as blatant “lies” without offering the same treatment to Democrats, Fleischer said.
Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer has authored a new book about media mistakes, titled: “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong — And Just Doesn’t Care”.
(Courtesy of Ari Fleischer )
“I think what motivated a lot of reporters was they saw Donald Trump as an existential threat to America,” Fleischer said. “And they used their power, and they used their perch to do something about it. And in so doing, that helped destroy a lot of trust in the institutions of the press corps.”
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Among Fleischer’s examples: The COVID-19 lab-leak theory that was initially shunned as conspiracy, the Hunter Biden laptop story that was suppressed by Big Tech and the Trump-Russia collusion story — spurred on by the infamous Steele dossier.
“The Steele dossier should have been shunned by every reporter with good instincts,” Fleischer said of the discredited political opposition research compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele alleging an extensive conspiracy between Trump and the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
“Instead, it became a multi-year feeding frenzy, when it turns out it’s totally wrong. Contrast that with their coverage of what Joe Biden said about his son Hunter’s business partners and business interests. Joe Biden’s statements have been contradicted by texts and emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, but the media suppressed that story. And Big Tech shut down the New York Post for revealing it.”
The American public’s trust in the press has been at or near historical lows, according to polls. Just 7% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” and 29% “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting, according to a 2021 Gallup poll. Combined, that 36% level of confidence is just slightly above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
“The mainstream media is in decline and in denial — and both are bad places to be,” Fleischer says.
Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who set up Orbis Business Intelligence and compiled a dossier on Donald Trump, in London where he has spoken to the media for the first time.
(Victoria Jones/PA Images via Getty Images)
Outlets like CNN and the New York Times are still salvageable, but it will take hiring reporters and editors who don’t sound like college-educated Democrats, according to Fleischer. Journalism schools and newsrooms need to recruit people with views like the other half of America — pro-life people, people who carry guns, religious people and more.
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If newsroom decisions involved employees who think differently, some of this bad reporting would have never made it to print or on air, Fleischer argues.
“Journalism has original sin. And the original sin is who becomes a reporter in the first place,” Fleischer said. “And here, journalism has a diversity problem. Their newsrooms don’t look like America. They don’t sound like America. They sound like half of America. They sound like college-educated, overwhelmingly Democratic voting people.”
This is Fleischer’s second book. His first was a 2005 memoir about his time in the Bush White House, called “Taking Heat.”
Fox News’ Andrew Murray contributed to this report.
