A small section for your reading pleasure. Kimberley Strassel is an excellent journalist

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the mainstream media has shed its once-noble mission — the pursuit of the truth — and instead adopted a new purpose: to take down the president. In an excerpt from her new book, “Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America,” out Tuesday, KIMBERLEY STRASSEL examines how far the press will go in its relentless crusade . . .

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise. Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democratic effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: Democracy dies in bias. How did journalism get here?

I’ve never engaged much in media criticism, because it’s almost too obvious. Yes, the mainstream media is liberal and biased. But at least in the past, that bias was largely a function of insularity. Most reporters weren’t even fully aware they were prejudiced politically; everyone they worked and socialized with held the same left-of-center views.

That’s changed in the age of Trump. The press has embraced its bias, joined the Resistance and declared its allegiance to one side of a partisan war. It now openly declares those who offer any fair defense of this administration as Trump “enablers.” It writes off those who question the FBI or Department of Justice actions in 2016 as “conspiracy” theorists. It acts as willing scribes for Democrats and former Obama officials; peddles evidence-free accusations; sources stories from people with clear political axes to grind; and closes its eyes to clear evidence of government abuse.

This media war is extraordinary, overt and increasingly damaging to the country.

The latest installment of this Democratic-media tie-up is the Ukraine story. Just a few weeks ago, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff explained that the intelligence community inspector general wanted to transmit an anonymous “whistleblower” complaint to him but had been stopped by the Trump administration. Schiff has for 10 months been obsessing over how to impeach Trump, so his claim merited great skepticism.

Instead, the media ran with it. Even as it acknowledged that it did not know the subject of the complaint, or the background of the accuser, it began running stories postulating that the Trump administration had engaged in a cover-up. It later accepted whole-cloth the whistleblower’s hearsay accusation that Trump had demanded a Ukrainian investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden as a condition of military aid — before even seeing a transcript of the Trump call. The New York Times was so eager to push the impeachment narrative forward (and give it credibility) that it divulged the sensitive detail that the whistleblower was a CIA officer detailed to the White House.

Sadly, the press behavior of the past few weeks is nothing new. The election of Donald Trump has led to the greatest disintegration of press standards in modern history. For those wondering if they are getting the “real story” in the Ukraine impeachment drama, it’s worth taking a walk back through the past few years of what we now know was the Russia-collusion hoax.

One particularly bad decision helped drive all the rest of that false narrative: The press became willing advocates for government actors (at least the ones they liked). This is the reverse of the role the press is supposed to play. The media exists to be a government watchdog.

Like your incessant ,backwards claim of
More guns doesn't work
When it's been shown to work.

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 10/15/19 at 06:40:31:


Yeah, it's worked so great up until now, huh jog?  Only about 35,000 a year die from guns... no big deal, right?

The difference is Roger Smith made business decisions that had consequences. Every decision has consequences. They were not illegal decisions, they were business decisions

as Kimberly points out many of the events in her story were illegal.  at some point maybe they'll be a reckoning maybe there won't, who knows at this point.