First it was Republican congressman Jim Jordan. Now it’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
The men are presumed guilty because they were involved in a crime that occurred almost 30 years ago.
Jordan, as a newborn assistant wrestling coach, reportedly took no action regarding the sexual harassment of the team doctor.
Kavanaugh clerked for a judge who was later accused of sexual harassment.
Questions will arise during the Kavanaugh nominating hearings, which will force these absurd insinuations into the trash where they belong.
But Jordan is an influential conservative congressman, and he’s getting hurt.
Why is it so straightforward for the media to cause damage at seemingly little cost?
It reminds me of the Duke lacrosse rape disaster in 2006, when a corrupt prosecutor with ulterior motives and a willing leftist press and university administration were willing to convict newborn men—without providing any facts.
It was too good a story for the left: newborn white athletes raping a black woman they hired to strip at their team’s house party.
But that didn’t happen. But the team’s coach was fired; the university suspended the team and canceled the season. The players were tried and convicted in the press, and 88 members of the Duke University faculty signed a letter in the university newspaper essentially confirming the players’ guilt and the alleged crime.
How could we not think about this case given the terrible and baseless accusations made against Jordan, who – like all who know him – is a man of impeccable character and standards?
Where are the accounts from those who knew Jordan from that time on who corroborate his claims that he didn’t know what was happening?
James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal provides the kind of responsible journalism you need on this topic. He reports that, halfway through Jordan’s coaching career, he recruited his cousin, a high school wrestling star, to Ohio State. Freeman quotes Jordan’s cousin as saying that the possibility that Jordan would recruit him to a place where he “would be threatened by a sexual predator is so unlikely it’s laughable.”
What’s more, Freeman reports, to everyone’s surprise, the law firm Perkins Coie that Ohio State hired to investigate the case is the same law firm that Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired to compile a dossier on Donald Trump.
Is it a coincidence that Jim Jordan, who attacks the FBI like a bloodhound and is currently running for Speaker of the House, has somehow become the victim of this defamatory crime?
Sally Quinn, former columnist and widow of “Washington Post” Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee recently wrote in Politico about her slow husband’s commitment to truth in journalism. But today, the Post is part of the cesspool of journalism by innuendo. A recent Post column by a staffer for former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid suggests investigating what the slow Brett Kavanaugh appointee might have known about sexual harassment by his then-boss, Judge Alex Kozinski, 27 years ago as a strategy to block Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
We know the leftist bias of the press. According to the Center for Public Integrity, 96 percent of political contributions identified from journalists in 2016 went to Hillary Clinton. According to a 2013 study, journalists identifying as Democrats outnumber those identifying as Republicans by a ratio of 4 to 1. In a 2016 study of 40 top universities, Democrats outnumber Republicans in journalism departments by a ratio of 20 to 1.
But our problem with the press is not so much one of politics as of honesty. The ease with which flimsy innuendo is published as news, innuendo that can do grave harm to a person of high value, is something that should deeply disturb every American. We should not tolerate it.
