Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump regularly complain that the “mainstream media” is biased against them and in the pocket of the Democratic Party.

Not true, says journalist and Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr.

If it appears that way, that’s because journalists follow facts — and too often today Republicans and Trump supporters are content to repeat falsehoods and baseless statements labeled as “alternative facts,” Bacon said.

For instance, Trump and many of his supporters have been perpetuating the “big lie,” that somehow the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraud.

That, of course, led to the deadly January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

“But I think we’ve determined it to mean journalism should be equally distant between two the two parties and I think that is not realistic. Journalism has a bias for facts, evidence and truth and if like half of the voters in one party and a lot of the elected officials in the party are not truthful, journalists are going to cover that and look like their covering that party more negatively,” said Bacon, who previously was a staff writer for the website FiveThirtyEight.

“So this in environment we have to prioritize, we have to be pro-truth, pro-democracy, pro-evidence and I think that will make it look like we’re pro-democratic. But I think we should be pro-democrat, small ‘d’ not capital ‘D’,” he added.

Content from The Bipartisan Press. All Rights Reserved.