Media Bias: When not complaining about President Trump's attacks on the news media, the press keeps publishing fake news stories about Trump. Case in point is the recent Washington Post "bombshell" story that the Trump administration was denying passports to Latinos.
 
The nearly 2,000-word Post story, which ran on August 29, made the explosive charge that the Trump administration was systematically denying passports to Latin-Americans along the border, accusing them of using fraudulent birth certificates.
The story got huge pick up by other news outlets. But was riddled with errors. So much so that even the left-wing, virulently anti-Trump Huffington Post felt compelled to expose its flaws.

False Facts

Among many other problems, the Washington Post reporter cited several policies as evidence of Trump's crackdown. Turns out all of them predated Trump.
The story also claimed that Trump officials had been increasingly denying passports to those with birth certificates signed by midwives suspected of peddling false documents.
But State Department data show the opposite. This type of passport denial peaked in 2015 — when President Obama was running things — at close to 1,500. These denials had dropped to just 971 last year, and are on course to be even lower this year.

The Washington Post ended up making several revisions to the story, which now includes a lengthy editor's note explaining all the changes.
But as the Huffpost notes, even with those changes, "the Post's report remains misleading."
"It relies on anecdotal evidence to make an explosive claim that's contradicted by official data ― and doesn't make that fact clear. It implies that years-old practices are new. And the paper consistently refused to correct the record unless it was called out by other reporters."
This is a rare, and brutal, takedown by one liberal news outlet of another's horrid reporting. So, kudos to the Huffington Post for running this fact check, particularly since doing so meant it was — gasp! — defending the Trump administration.
But the Post story points to a broader, and very troubling trend in the news media. The mainstream press decided long ago that Trump doesn't deserve to be president. And it's been on a relentless campaign ever since to discredit his administration.

One Way Fake News

Not surprisingly, the result has been a serious erosion in journalistic standards when it comes to stories that hurt Trump. Facts get jumbled, false assumptions made, unreliable sources quoted. And as a result, prominent news outlets have repeatedly had to amend, fix, or retract many other "bombshell" stories that make Trump, or his administration, look bad.
One of the more recent examples: CNN reported that Michael Cohen had information showing that Trump knew about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Devastating if true. The story claimed it was based on several unnamed sources. But there was only one source, Cohen's attorney, Lanny Davis, a devoted Hillary Clinton backer. Davis later admitted he was wrong.
Yet when Trump tries to point these glaring journalistic failings out, the same press attacks him again for supposedly undermining the First Amendment.

Bashing Trump For Calling Out Fake News

Two days after the Post's error-riddled passport story ran, for example, the same paper's opinion writer Greg Sargent complained that Trump's criticism of the press at a rally was "more alarming and dangerous than usual."
What did Trump say that so alarmed Sargent?
"Today's Democrat Party is held hostage by left-wing haters, angry mobs, deep-state radicals, establishment cronies and their fake news allies."
But Trump is absolutely right about the Democratic Party's lurch to the far left. We've been pointing this out for years. And anyone who's been following recent news knows that the existence of an anti-Trump "Deep State" is far from a paranoid delusion.
So what's left? Trump's claim that the media are allies of the Democrats?
The only thing alarming and dangerous about that claim is the fact that so many in the media refuse to admit it.