Every time I think the political left has hit rock bottom, they pull out a shovel. This week it was a jackhammer and a backhoe, and they went even deeper.
It all started with nearly 350 newspapers uniting against President Trump to declare themselves free and independent from groupthink and bias. Every single one of them proclaimed themselves, in one form or another, defenders of truth. If you missed it in your newspaper, it was probably less than a 1,000-word recount of what was Omarosa’s latest wild claim of the day.
What’s lost in this self-serving exercise is that President Trump isn’t saying that journalists are the “enemy of the people,” he’s saying that “fake news” is. That says something about the subconscious of many people in the media who hear “fake news is the enemy of the people” and think they’re talking about you. I imagine it’s like how a cheater feels when someone casually mentions an affair in front of their spouse—it’s not really about them, but they know what they did.
These newspapers investigate matters less than a cat investigates a dead insect, and yet they consider themselves crucial arbiters of truth; this arbiters of truth. But what truths do they pursue?
The media has become a conspiracy theorist. For all the attacks on Alex Jones, he doesn’t live up to the Russia story they’ve been pushing since the election. The lack of evidence hasn’t stopped or even slowed their repetition of rumors or the flow of false stories that miraculously always flow in one direction – anti-Trump. Everything they’ve done wrong and/or had to correct or retract has reinforced the narrative.
Because these arbiters of truth are true believers. Not in Russian history, but in the cause. When you want something to be true, you allow your mind to fill in the gaps, to connect the dots. They want there to be an explanation for why Hillary Clinton lost that doesn’t include enough Americans in the states with a majority of the electoral votes who simply chose Trump over her; who rejected their ideas, their ideology. They need it not to be true.
To maintain this narrative, they will believe anything, anyone, including Omarosa. It is proof of how far someone will go to tell people exactly what they want to hear.
Journalists are ready to believe her, just as they are ready to believe any anonymous source offering what they want. Journalism used to have standards that included at least two sources, especially anonymous ones, to get a story published. Now it plays telephone with former government officials who have “heard” something from someone in a position to know, enough to stop the press.
It’s not the lowering of standards that worries me so much, it’s the double standards. And it’s not just Trump, it’s anyone with an (R) after their name.
Ohio State Rep. Jim Jordan is a staunch conservative and is running for Speaker of the House next year. As speculation about the idea began to circulate in the media, accusations began to surface that Jordan knew about alleged abuse of wrestlers by the team doctor while he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State. Some of the accusers had shady pasts, but they weren’t asked about them. And no one said Jordan knew or that they told him, it was more of a “he had to know” accusation.
With only what would have been laughed out of court if it had ever made it to court, CNN and MSNBC jumped into the “scandal” at the deep end, with some participants speculating that the story could lead to Jordan’s resignation. The unequivocal denials and total lack of evidence did not stop reporting and expert opinions. The story eventually fell apart, and one of the accusers recanted. There were no panels to discuss the fallout from his failed assassination attempt on his reputation; it was treated as if it had never happened.
Compare Jordan’s treatment with that of Rep. Keith Ellison, the number two pick on the Democratic National Committee and candidate for Minnesota attorney general.
The allegations against Ellison of domestic violence against his ex-girlfriend have been known to the “media for over a year,” according to a Washington Post reporter but “some media outlets dug into the story and didn’t find enough to connect with.” The accusations weren’t second-hand, they came directly from the accuser. Still, they weren’t stern enough to bother reporting.
It wasn’t until the day before Ellison’s vote Tuesday that the story began to gain traction. Early voting had been underway for some time, and the case really gained national attention only on the day of the vote, so it couldn’t have affected Ellison’s effortless victory. Suddenly, on Thursday, CBS finally interviewed the accuser and released the material. It was mostly sincere material, with a skepticism that hadn’t been there since the beginning of the #MeToo movement.
The way Jordan was treated by the media compared to how Ellison was treated is like night and day. Secondhand “must have known” was worthy of attention, firsthand accusations of a man laying his hands on a woman were not. It wasn’t until the son of Ellison’s accuser posted something on Facebook claiming he had seen video evidence of the abuse that the media decided they could no longer ignore it.
These are the same editors who published editorials condemning criticism of their profession.
When former CIA Director John Brennan was stripped of his national security clearance, a partisan critic of the president went on MSNBC and wrote an editorial in the New York Times claiming that Trump was trying to silence him. Showing no self-awareness or common sense, that nonsensical claim was repeated by the liberal media, as were those TV appearances, and the editorial never happened. If Brennan was going to be silenced, having him have a megaphone was a strange way to do it.
When sixty (6-0) former CIA employees signed a letter criticizing the President’s decision on Brennan, it was presented as a massive move. Politico said“The huge number of retired senior intelligence officials and spies who have criticized the president can best be described as an avalanche.”
I’m no CIA expert, and I don’t know how many CIA employees are still alive who are no longer working there, but I’d guess more than a few dozen; I’d guess thousands. With that in mind, how does sixty people constitute an “avalanche”?
Of course not. The letter is history, it’s news, but as the left always does, they’ve hyped it up because they want it to have more significance than it does.
Yes, stripping a former CIA chief of his security clearance is “unprecedented,” as journalists like to say, but so is a former CIA chief accusing the president of the United States of treason because he disagrees with his political goals. The former is regularly reported as such, the latter never.
Is this “facing the truth” or is it imitation news?
It’s somewhere in the middle, although much closer to false than true. But not at all surprising, given the media.
And that’s the problem – journalism has become a collective-minded activist group. No one wants to be last when a story is negative towards Republicans, and no one wants to be first when someone is negative towards Democrats. It doesn’t matter what turns out to be true, when a story is out there, it is out there, when it’s ignored, it’s not.
If journalists really want to soften Trump’s charge that imitation news is the enemy of the people, maybe they should stop covering it. If chants of “CNN sucks” really keep reporters up at night, maybe they should stop sucking. That would be more likely to silence critics than collective whining and all the editorials in the world combined.
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