Donald Trump famously called the Fake News Media the “enemy of the people,†but they should more appropriately be called “the enemy of the truth†– especially with regard to how Trump and his supporters are treated.
It is hard to know whether the news anchors and reporters who shape the mainstream narrative are corrupt, stupid or just plain lazy, but they seem to be incapable of doing their basic job of informing the public of the facts.
This all became self-evident during the Russia Collusion Hoax, when the New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for collaborating with anonymous fabulists who wanted to disrupt the Trump presidency. More recently, we’ve endured the Big Lie Hoax. Every time you’ve heard a reporter say that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud in 2020, you know that you are dealing with a person who lacks the one essential trait of a good journalist – curiosity. Open your eyes!
Last week we witnessed one of the most shameful episodes in the history of journalism, as there was a tidal wave of fake reporting about what the Republican National Committee did when it chastised two GOP members of Congress in an exceedingly rare formal act of censure.
According to the New York Times, by passing the censure resolution, “The Republican Party … officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it ‘legitimate political discourse.’†That was shortened in the online headline to “G.O.P. declares Jan. 6 attack “Legitimate Political Discourse.â€
“Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,†the resolution declared, “and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation [with the Republican Party] to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.â€
The resolution does not specifically define who is being persecuted by the Jan. 6 committee for engaging in “legitimate political discourse,†but you can bet no one on the Republican National Committee thought it was a reference to rioters smashing windows, assaulting police or desecrating the U.S. Capitol. The RNC later explained that the resolution was a reference to Americans being chased down with subpoenas and threatened with jail time because they had supported President Trump’s attempt to prove election fraud. But the media pundits stuck with their initial claim that the RNC had defended political violence. If reporters were doing their real job instead of carrying water for the Democratic Party, they could have looked up “discourse†in the dictionary and discovered that it refers to “written or spoken communication or debate.†There’s no way to apply that word to the Jan. 6 riot unless you are intentionally misleading the public, but that’s just what countless journalists did.
To put it plainly, what was missing last week in almost all of the media reports was one brave reporter who stared back at Jake Tapper or Martha Raddatz or Joe Scarborough and said, “You know that’s not what the RNC resolution said. They never claimed that the violence on January 6 was legitimate political discourse, so let’s set the record straight.â€
That void of media truth-telling was despicable, only rivaled by the spectacle of Republicans rushing in to denounce their party leadership for condemning party disloyalty. This allowed the Trump-hating media to put together clips of the usual suspects – Sens. Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski, among others – pleading with their fellow Republicans to bend a knee and go along with the debasing Democrat agenda. Pathetic.
Read the FULL COLUMN and comment at Real Clear Politics. Follow Frank Miele’s blog at Heartland Diary USA.