The significance of the passage of time – to quote our esteemed Vice President Kamala Harris – is that it takes the urgency out of even the most despicable actions. The Durham report, coming so long after the corruption occurred, was readily dismissed as a nothingburger by the legacy media who easily convinced viewers that it no longer mattered.
The fact remains that the Democrats’ full court press to frame former President Donald Trump as an agent of Russia was the most egregious and consequential political dirty trick in modern memory. Going well beyond a smear campaign, it was an all-hands-on-deck offensive that we now know reached all the way to then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden and top-ranking administration officials.
But none of it would have been possible if journalists hadn’t abandoned all pretense of objectivity and willingly hopped on the bandwagon to trumpet the FBI’s malicious – and false – narrative that Trump was working with the Kremlin to win the presidency. As the story grew bigger and bigger, our corrupt corporate media amplified the Left’s propaganda and ridiculed Trump’s accusations that he’d been framed. The media is thoroughly complicit.
In May 2020, long before we even knew about Hunter Biden’s laptop, then-President Trump seized on the extraordinary actions taken by top-ranking Obama administration officials four years earlier and repeatedly accused Obama himself of being in on the “crime.”
Here’s what passed for “journalism” at that time. Politico writer Jack Shafer penned an op-ed titled “How Not to Listen to Donald Trump.” According to this so-called journalist, “until the president comes up with actual evidence for his allegations, we’re under no obligation to pay attention.” He accused Trump of filling the “air with the ack-ack of disinformation and misdirection, needlessly alarming the public and sending reporters on wild goose chases to either confirm or disprove his allegations.”
Shafer continued, “Now it could be that Obama did commit the biggest political crime in the history of the USA. If there’s a shred of evidence, I want Obama investigated. If the investigation bears fruit, I want him to have a fair trial. If he’s found guilty, I want him punished. But show me that shred of evidence first or I’m going back to bed.”
The evidence was overwhelming, but Shafer dutifully pulled the covers over his head anyway and slept through the political scandal of the century. Being the hard-hitting investigative journalist that he was, he declared that Trump had “forfeited the automatic right to our investigative attention.” And finally, he advised colleagues not to be “dupe[s]” and to “use just one ear.”
At the same time, the far-left Tom Nichols, a writer for the Atlantic, tweeted: “The Trump people are going to unleash a blizzard of bullsh**, including selective releases and declassifications and leaks, and if the media chases every one of these as bombshell[s], they’re going to end up being a functioning arm of the Trump campaign.”
Had Shafer, Nichols, or any of the other ethically depraved members of the press yet fully grasped that they themselves had morphed into a functioning arm of the Biden campaign? It’s their job to report the news objectively, a responsibility which they have collectively abdicated.
The Democratic Party, which now counts permanent Washington and the media among its members, were amateurs in 2016. Perhaps that’s why Trump won the election. However, by the time of the 2020 election, they’d upped their game considerably.
The “Twitter Files” revealed that an unholy alliance between the Democratic Party, the FBI, Big Tech, and the media worked together to ensure a Biden victory. These entities abused their power to achieve a common goal: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The revelations about Twitter’s inside dealings with the FBI exposed a concerted effort to manipulate the free flow of information to voters ahead of a critical election.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley recently concluded that the legacy media in the U.S. now resembles the state media of China or any other totalitarian nation. And he is right.
The purpose of a free press is to hold the government accountable for its actions. According to the ACLU, “a free media functions as a watchdog that can investigate and report on government wrongdoing.”
How far the media elite have fallen from those lofty ideals.
One particularly astute liberal writer, the Nation’s Patrick Lawrence, understood what was happening early on. In February 2017, shortly after Gen. Michael Flynn’s resignation as Trump’s national security adviser, Lawrence wrote: “You have studied the Enlightenment? Good: You know what I mean when I say we are headed into the Endarkenment. The lights upon us are dimming. We have been more or less abandoned by a press that proves incapable of informing us in anything approaching a disinterested fashion. As suggested, either the media are Clintonian liberals before they are newspapers and broadcasters, or they are servants of power before they serve us.”
A previous version of this article appeared in The Washington Examiner.
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