There’s a disturbing trend among mainstream news outlets these days. Call it “airbrushing history” or putting inconvenient news or facts “down the memory hole.”

Whatever you call it, it’s a long way from the notion of delivering the news “without fear or favor.” That last phrase, “without fear or favor,” came originally from the lips of Adolph Ochs, the founder of The New York Times.

That notion, that a newspaper should print the news, the truth, no matter who it offends, who it hurts, who it embarrasses, or who it angers, seems quaint and outmoded in today’s media environment.

It’s ironic that the paper that has most enthusiastically jettisoned Ochs’ dictum happens to be The New York Times itself. Uncle Adolph can’t be happy, looking down from that great newsroom in the sky.

This trend is not limited to the Times. We’ve all seen ABC, CBS, or The Washington Post conduct a poll, and when the results are not rosy for Democrats or the left, somehow the poll, or the embarrassing parts of it, never get reported. If you want to see many examples, go to MRC.org. You’ll be amazed.

Sometimes it’s not a poll, but what a news medium’s very own reporters already have reported that gets the airbrushes out and the lid taken off the memory hole. The New York Times had to take such action on Dec. 17.

Times reporters Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris wrote about President Obama’s meeting with opinion columnists, in which he addressed the terror climate after the San Bernardino attacks. Here’s a paragraph from their original story:

In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments.

This was an amazing admission by a president, that he was so out of touch with the American people that he didn’t appreciate their apprehension about the growing terrorism problem.

Very quickly, the paragraph was expunged from the story. As social media exploded, a Times spokesman said the paragraph was deleted for space reasons for the print edition.

But many social media observers noted that the Times didn’t just delete the paragraph above, but added two more, which made the added material twice as long as the original excised paragraph. So much for the space argument.

I think any objective observer understands what happened: The Times realized after publishing the offending paragraph that this was too damaging to Obama to let stand, and it had to go down the memory hole.

So much for “without fear or favor.”

Jon Ham (@rivlax) is a vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.