The suicide of the press, media double-denial on Joe’s decline and other commentary

Iconoclast: The Suicide of the Press

President Trump’s move “to restrict public funds to NPR and PBS” is “is a moment the media should use for long-overdue self-reflection,” explains Jonathan Turley at The Hill.

“The damage done to the press in the last decade” is “almost entirely self-inflicted,” as it dropped “the touchstones of neutrality and objectivity” to become an “echo chamber that amplifies liberal and often partisan Democratic talking points.”

Now “readers and viewers have left mainstream media in an exodus,” yet “editors and reporters continue to saw at the branch upon which they are sitting.”

NPR, unworried “that its shrinking audience was overwhelmingly white, liberal and affluent,” assumed “it could make the vast majority of the country, which does not listen to its programming, help pay for its programming.”

Now, like the rest of the media, it must “choose between sustaining its bias or expanding its audience.”

Libertarian: Media Double-Denial on Joe’s Decline

As some in the press admit “mainstream media’s failure to swiftly cover former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline,” notes Reason’s Robby Soave, former NBC host Chuck Todd still insists “this stupid premise” is “a manufactured right-wing premise to stain the media,” arguing that the pundits who “carried water for Joe Biden” were “not journalists,” but “former strategists.”

Soave pushes back: “Mainstream media didn’t just ignore the story: They adopted the framing of Biden’s defenders and pushed the idea that conservatives were making it all up.”

“Biden staffers, strategists, and Democratic Party leaders” may have led the cover-up, but “much of the media went along for the ride.” 

Veteran: Hooray! Military Recruitment’s Up

The US “military is seeing its biggest recruitment surge in more than a decade,” cheers Rob Maness at the Association of Mature American Citizens, “and it’s no mystery why”: After Team Biden spent years turning “our armed forces into a woke Marxist social experiment,” President Trump’s “bold, unapologetic America First vision is inspiring the country’s young patriots to step up.”

The Army has a “groundswell of young people eager to join.”

They want to “fight for the United States,” not attend “diversity seminars” or “learn how to use ‘preferred pronouns.’”

They “crave meaning — something bigger than themselves. The military offers that.”

And they’re “inspired by a president who projects strength.” As someone who’s served, he writes, “I’ve never been prouder.”

Politics beat: Dems’ Empty Agenda

The Democratic Party “is still floundering to find its way in a second Trump term,” snarks Ingrid Jacques at USA Today.

The lameness isn’t just Tim “Walz’s ‘code talk’ messaging and [Kamala] Harris’ elephant-circling strategy.”

Dems have “failed to present any credible alternatives on the pressing issues that the president is tackling — including border security, trade and the deficit.”

Thus a poll asking voters “whom they think is doing a better job handling the country’s main problems,” “40% said Trump. Just 32% said congressional Democrats.”

Yet 2028 hopeful Gov. JB Pritzker (D-Ill.) just “called for a ‘bold’ agenda” but “his recommendations left a lot to be desired,” with no more than a call for “for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption.”

No: “Raging against Trump and his supporters has repeatedly failed for Democrats. And it will again.”

From the right: Homeless Sex-Offender Horrors

A new report shows that “sex offenders account for more than 20% of the unsheltered homeless population in 20 states, and more than 10% in 32 states,” notes Devon Kurtz at City Journal — and the median share is 20% nationwide.

Keep in mind, “States’ registries consist primarily of people who have committed serious offenses like rape or the sexual abuse of a child” and sex offenders commit new sex crimes after prison release at two to four times the rate of other offenders.

Yet “the US Department of Housing and Urban Development allows publicly funded programs” to keep sex offenders in facilities that help women and children, even as “academics reject the connection, insisting that the homeless pose no elevated crime threat.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board