Once again the “Mainstream Media” have exhibited their bias against President Donald J. Trump in their slanted coverage and commentary of Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
This “reporting” run by major news organizations, written and “reported” by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing, turned out to be either misrepresented or completely wrong.
If we are to accept the pleadings of journalists, in their attempts at apologetics, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be.
But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way?
Why hasn’t there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story?
Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?
Maybe the problem is that too many people are working backward from a preconception.
Maybe newsrooms have too many people who view the world through an identical prism.
This brings three lines of questioning to mind.
First: Do news organizations typically run stories about documents they’ve never authenticated? Can they point to a single story about the Obama administration CNN has written using a similar process?
Second: Why would two independent sources lie about a date on an e-mail if they didn’t want to mislead the public? And how independent could they really be? How many stories regarding the “Russian-collusion investigation” has CNN run from these same sources?
Three: If sources lie to you, why not burn them?
There may be good reasons to avoid exposing a dishonest source. Perhaps it will scare away legitimate whistleblowers. Perhaps reporters want to preserve relationships with those in power — because they may help on other stories in the future. At the end of the day, you’re in contest for information.
But these people have put the reporters’ reputation, even their jobs, in danger. Moreover, they have engaged in a serious abuse of the public trust and an abuse of power.
Who knows how many of these mistakes, spread over numerous outlets, came from the same sources? This seems newsworthy.
When honest mistakes are found, the knee-jerk reaction of many journalists has been portraying themselves as sentinels of free speech and democracy. Often they will attempt to do this by contrasting their track record on truth with that of their perception that Donald Trump is untruthful.
What that fails to do, however, is undermine the ability of the press to report stories accurately. Trump didn’t make your activist sources lie.
The fact that many journalists have a political agenda is not new, but they have become a proxy of operatives who peddle falsehoods, and they have lost credibility with an even bigger swath of the audience.
It doesn’t really matter if it through sloppy or lazy reporting or if it is because they are willing accomplices in a “soft coup” against the duly elected President of the United States. The result is the same.
The media emperor is naked and he/she is peddling fake news.
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