This American Spectator essay is required reading. (H/T ECM)

It is basically a list of the most egregious examples of media bias in recent memory. I am not old enough to remember some of these, especially the JFK ones. So this was a real eye-opener to me.

Here’s a summary of the points raised:

What’s particularly interesting is that the stories not reported about JFK were in the early 1960s, the effort to not report the story about President Clinton was in 1998, the story on John Edwards was hushed through the time it counted most, in the election cycle of 2008 when he was a serious presidential candidate, and the decision not to report on Van Jones was — well — two weeks ago, and ACORN but last week. Which is to say, September of 2009.

In other words, across five decades of American journalistic history, the instinct of many Old Media institutions — specifically including NBC and the New York Times — has been to deliberately withhold the truth. To quite deliberately use their journalism skills and tools to misrepresent those whose politics they do not favor.

Were this, say, the field of medicine, practitioners of this kind of thing would lose their license to practice, sued for and surely convicted of malpractice. As it is, the examples listed here are what might be termed “media malpractice,” evidencing a clear and convincing pattern of deceit.

The mainstream media is totally untrustworthy.