Media bias, partisanship and attacks on the press

Answer the first question by defining bias before assessing it, because the word covers several different things that behave differently. Selection bias concerns which stories get covered at all; framing bias concerns how a story is presented once chosen; and statement or tone bias concerns the evaluative language used about the actors involved. Research generally finds selection and framing effects easier to demonstrate than systematic partisan slant in reporting, and audience sorting, meaning people choosing outlets that already agree with them, accounts for a great deal of what audiences then experience as bias in the coverage itself. Saying which of the three kinds you mean is what turns an opinion into an argument, and it also sets up the second half of the first question, since whether the press should become explicitly partisan depends entirely on which of those problems you think explicit partisanship would actually solve.

That partisanship question has a real case on both sides worth stating. Explicit alignment would be more honest than a professed neutrality that readers do not believe, and it is the historical norm in several democracies where a partisan press coexists with high trust. Against that, an openly partisan press gives up the shared factual baseline that democratic argument depends on, and it accelerates the sorting that already drives polarisation. The second question is different in kind: it asks why a president took this approach, which is a question about political strategy rather than about whether the criticism was warranted. The analytical answer is that delegitimising the press pre-emptively discounts unfavourable reporting, consolidates supporters around a shared adversary, and shifts the argument from the substance of a story to the credibility of its source. Note the escalation from fake news to enemy of the people, since the second phrase carries historical weight the first does not.