The observation has become so obvious it's almost commonplace. Since Donald Trump's return to the White House in January 2025, a significant portion of major Western media outlets—primarily American, but also European—appears to have definitively abandoned journalism's fundamental principle: reporting facts without bias. This is no longer a matter of editorial sensitivity or legitimate critical angles. It is a structural, measurable, documented phenomenon. A study by Harvard's Shorenstein Center, published in February 2026, reveals that 87% of media coverage of the Trump presidency in five major American outlets (CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News) is classified as 'negative'—a figure stable since 2017 and unmatched by any other president in the modern era, whether Democrat or Republican.
The issue is not with criticism. Criticizing power is not only legitimate; it is the very purpose of a free press. The problem lies in the systematic asymmetry of treatment. When Trump negotiates a trade deal, the dominant framing is 'what could go wrong.' When the economy creates jobs, the reflex is to look for flaws in the numbers. When a foreign policy decision yields a result, however partial, coverage focuses on risks rather than achievements. This selective negativity bias—non-existent or inverted for other leaders—creates an informational distortion that serves neither the public, nor democracy, nor the profession itself. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism measured in 2025 that trust in traditional media has fallen to 32% in the US and 38% in Europe—historic lows.
The mechanisms behind this bias are numerous and often unconscious. The first is sociological: American and European major media newsrooms are composed of 78% journalists who identify as 'progressive' or 'center-left,' according to a 2025 internal Pew Research Center poll. This ideological homogeneity does not necessarily breed bad faith, but it generates blind spots: certain perspectives are simply never considered because no one in the newsroom holds them. The second mechanism is economic: 'Trump bashing' sells. CNN saw its ratings surge by 40% during periods of aggressive Trump coverage. The business model of perpetual outrage has become a trap from which newsrooms struggle to escape.
The third, perhaps most insidious, mechanism is that of a variable 'fact-checking' standard. Trump's statements are scrutinized with obsessive meticulousness—which is healthy—but the same standard is almost never applied to his opponents or the experts invited to comment on him. When a Washington Post columnist claims 'the economy is collapsing under Trump,' nobody fact-checks this assertion, which is contradicted by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This double standard undermines the credibility of the entire exercise and fuels the populist narrative that the media is 'the enemy of the people'—a dangerous rhetoric that feeds precisely on the profession's real flaws.
The question we pose at OrChair—as a media outlet founded on algorithmic transparency and the absence of political shareholders—is this: wouldn't an openly opinionated journalism be more honest than a pseudo-objectivity that deceives no one anymore? The Anglo-Saxon model of strict separation between 'news' and 'opinion' has clearly failed in practice, even if it remains a laudable theoretical ideal. Perhaps it is time to admit that every media outlet has a line, to display it clearly, and to let the reader navigate with full knowledge. What is truly bizarre, as our title highlights, is not that a media outlet is critical of a leader. It is that it invests so much energy in wanting him to fail—risking wishing, consciously or not, that the country he leads fails with him. And that, no journalism worthy of the name can justify.
