When Trump calls a reporter a "sleaze," most Americans know exactly what he is talking about.  We have often talked about it on American Thinker, and, judging by our commentators, many Americans truly hate the media.  Other than our corrupt Congress, the media rate as consistently the most hated institution in this country. 

The press lie constantly, and their lies are exposed every day by conservative radio and opinion sites.  Lying to the public is a basic betrayal of a vital survival function in a democratic republic, a true stab in the back.  It is a husband betraying his wife and a father abandoning his children.  A soldier going over to the enemy.  The chief justice of the United States contradicting his own ruling on the same question a few months later.  The president colluding with sworn enemies in a time of war.

In J schools in this country, "betrayal" of the basic obligations of journalism has a name.  It's called "advocacy journalism," but it means lying to every single American.  There the art of dishonesty is brought to perfection.  Journalists have always lied, but crucially, they have not lied together, in unison, controlled by the same anti-American ideology, and in some cases actually taking dictation from America-haters, as in the Journolist Listserv, showing day-to-day cartel collusion in Popular Front-style left propaganda, involving forty major news media, led by the old Stalinist Guardian and the New York Times. 

It now turns out that the entire public narrative the media tells itself is one big lie from beginning to end, including Watergate. 

Watergate was not a story of two heroic Washington Post journalists making their bones by exposing the horrors of Richard Nixon's abuse of power.  It's the story of the Washington Post editor-in-chief colluding with the FBI's Mark Felt to destroy an elected president in revenge for failing to appoint Felt as director of the FBI.  Mark Felt was Deep Throat, who hated Nixon.  The WaPo "legend" about Woodward and Bernstein was pure lies to cover national betrayal.

The media cartel never accepts criticism.  They have unbounded contempt for their customers, and for the last decade, I've simply walked away.  I get my news from far more reliable sources.  The web is a treasure house if you use it with good judgment.  In a free market, the New York Times and Washington Post would pass into the dustbin of history, against competition from fresh and more trustworthy news sources.  The media cartel buys immunity for itself by highly selective ownership by about a half-dozen international conglomerates – including Carlos Slim, who owns a piece of the Times. 

The media cartel earns immunity from antitrust prosecution by destroying the enemies of the left.  That is an ultra-corrupt bargain, and the public can sense it even if they don't know the grubby details.  We can recognize it every day. 

For some of us, the awareness of media betrayal goes back to Uncle Walter Cronkite, a hokey media front man for an anti-American socialist, who alone did much to destroy American military victory in Vietnam.  In World War II, Cronkite would have been considered an enemy saboteur, a psywar agent, a powerful pathogenic infection in the body politic.  He was all of those things, but most of all, he was a liar.

In a democratic republic, a constant diet of lies is toxic. 

As far as I'm concerned, any media face is guilty until proven innocent.  I can find the truth on the web, often from much better sources.  It takes a little more work, but the truth is worth it.  If the big empires disappeared tomorrow, I would celebrate.