By David Harsanyi
Frustrated by the inability of Democrats to cram through President Joe Biden’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion welfare-state expansion, House speaker Nancy Pelosi recently lectured the political media on the poor job they’ve done selling the bill. Lo and behold, a few days after Pelosi’s grousing, a slew of stories appeared in major publications like the New York Times that ratcheted up attacks on moderate Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin for their alleged dereliction of duty.
All of this is expected. The media have largely become a collection of well-funded outlets that set the agenda, narrative, tone, and focus of coverage while working in concert with a single major political party. Reporters and editors share the same objectives and values as progressive Democrats. They are motivated by liberal concerns just as surely as they are scandalized by conservative positions. What was once merely bias in reporting has evolved into full-blown partisan crusading.
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The mainstream media certainly aren’t letting up. To rationalize their unprofessional behavior, journalists have sanctimoniously assigned themselves the role of democracy’s defender. It was under the guise of this alleged heroism that the political press spent more than four years perpetuating one of the most corrosive and successful conspiracy theories in recent history — the Russia collusion scandal. Yet there was no price paid for getting major scoops wrong or plunging the country into paranoia. There was no self-reflection. No reform. In fact, Christopher Steele, the author of the Hillary Clinton–funded opposition brief used to perpetuate the story, was, only this week, interviewed by former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, to give an idea of how incestuously partisan the press has become.
Is it any wonder that the public’s trust in media has nosedived? The same media that allowed Joe Biden to run perhaps the least transparent campaign in modern American history now try to cover up his incoherence. The same media that campaign to destroy long-held Senate norms like the filibuster also recklessly attempt to destroy the reputation of Supreme Court justices. We have media that not only openly advocate for abortion and gun control but for censorship as well. None of this is to even mention the uniquely dishonest style of partisan “fact-checkers,” who operate under the false veneer of impartiality.
Sometimes, it’s not what the press covers, or even how it covers an issue, but rather what it refuses to cover. Whether it’s ignoring the radicalism of Biden nominees such as David Chipman or Kristen Clarke or Saule Omarova, quickly moving on from the disastrous abandonment of Americans in Afghanistan, or actively participating in the scandalous cover-up of the Hunter Biden emails and the subsequent evidence that Joe Biden might have been involved, media malfeasance will be called for what it is by National Review.
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