The left is so busy hating everything Trump-related that objective journalism remains out of reach of most mainstream news outlets.
AND recent article IN New York Times on state election reform proposals perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. In the wake of a presidential election marked by widespread lawlessness that generated unprecedented levels of public distrust, the Commission on Times has difficulty imagining efforts to fix the problem as anything other than an act of homage to Donald Trump. It seems that in the minds of most leftists, the term “election integrity” – as used by Republicans – is merely code for “voter suppression.” It simply assumes bad faith among GOP legislators.
In fact, conservative voters and lawmakers have many legitimate reasons to question the security of our electoral process after leftist officials engaged in an extralegal public-private partnership with Big Tech billionaires and progressive activists that involved inadvertently disregarding duly enacted laws that were introduced for the express purpose of ensuring free and fair elections.
Similar myopia distorted the account of President Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s chief election investigator. Articles from websites such as Washington Post. he relied on anonymous sources to paint a nefarious picture of the call, but just like us now I know from the recording of the conversation, an anonymous source grossly distorted the former president’s words. Phrases like “find a scam” have been circulating for months due to the gullibility of the scammer Lent and other publications, but in reality, President Trump merely encouraged the investigator to focus on ballots in Fulton County, predicting that officials there would find “dishonesty.”
What Trump said was significantly different from what had been widely reported, and the error was solely due to liberal reporters’ willingness to take unverifiable claims at face value because they were consistent with reporters’ preconceived notions. This is not responsible journalism – it is not even responsible expertise.
Left-wing media routinely resort to bullshit arguments, haughtily declaring that “numerous studies” show that voter fraud “barely exists” or that judges “rejected” conservative challenges to the 2020 election. Of course, strict academic research would necessarily have to rely on election data prior to 2020, and no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from the fact that judges refused to hear evidence presented in election integrity lawsuits filed after the 2020 election.
Plus, there is plenty of evidence of voter fraud if you actually look for it. A total of four people were recently charged with crimes in Texas 150 cases of electoral fraud involving “ballot harvesting,” tampering with government records, and fraudulent utilize of mail-in ballots.
This is exactly the behavior leftist government officials directly facilitated in 2020 by blatantly ignoring and defying state election laws.
In Wisconsin, officials allowed voters to exploit a loophole intended for unwell and disabled residents by expanding the definition of “indefinitely confined person” to include anyone who preferred not to vote in person on Election Day, circumventing the legal requirement to provide photo ID identity enabling absentee voting. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, election officials used grossly distorted definitions of statutory language to prevent Republican poll watchers from exercising meaningful oversight of the vote-counting process, which is supposed to be guaranteed to both major parties under election law in those states. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democratic secretaries of state grossly overstepped their authority to facilitate mail-in and mail-in voting, even granting left-wing activist organizations direct access to state voter rolls.
Perhaps most egregiously, state and local officials accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in private financing from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — often in violation of state laws expressly prohibiting the utilize of private funds for election administration — and used it to rewrite election rules without any input or authorization from regulators. state legislatures.
The effort was so successful that congressional Democrats will double their efforts pass legislation aimed at forcing every state in the union to codify these changes and repeal existing ballot security laws. It’s no surprise that Republicans are working at the state level to strengthen ballot security laws and close the loopholes the left exploited in 2020.
Neither side is pursuing their agenda in bad faith – both sides simply have different perspectives on the right way to strengthen our democracy. This is not surprising because our system of government is designed to pit opposing ideas against each other and achieve political outcomes through dialogue and compromise.
If journalists looked at it this way, they could serve as an irreplaceable force for good, helping to cut through the noise of partisan rhetoric and educate Americans about political issues. Unfortunately, most journalists today are much more likely to allow their blind hatred of Donald Trump to distort their own understanding of politics, leading them to repeat partisan attacks rather than clarifying the truth.
Ken Blackwell is a Senior Fellow on Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council. He is the former Secretary of State of Ohio.