“We are in danger of becoming like Russia, where intelligence officials try to control our domestic politics with lies and intimidation… A mainstream media in cahoots with dishonest and manipulative intelligence sources … is a special problem that falls to our generation to put right.” — The Wall Street Journal, 11/3/20

“Over the course of four years, [journalists] abandoned their traditional mistrust of the security state to transform themselves into a squad of little Pavlik Morozovs [i.e., informants], anxious to stamp out traitors to the cause and keep the news business clean of … [anything] that might help Donald Trump…” — Matt Taibbi, referring to the legendary 13-year-old said to have betrayed his father to Soviet authorities in 1932, Substack.com, 10/29/20

In four years, President Donald J. Trump has basically broken the media. The drive-bys have leaned left for a long time, but they at least pretended to pursue journalism. Now they don’t even pretend; they lie, they make it up, they ignore the Hunter/Joe Biden corruption story to protect the Democrat brand, they join conspiracies with the intel community, and participate in coups.

And they furiously go after any reporter who dares to step out of line. When Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Glenn Greenwald dared to report on the media handling of the Hunter laptop, he was kicked to the curb by The Intercept, the publication he cofounded! Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple excoriated cnn’s John King for saying on election night he thought juggling the Electoral College possibilities for either a Trump or Biden victory was “a lot of fun” and “exciting,” because after all, traumatized cnn viewers were agonizing over a possible Trump win.

In “The News Media Is Destroying Itself” at the independent site Substack, former Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi described the sorry state of journalism:

The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” … to fury at … lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc. It’s been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum.

No wonder a recent study by the Knight Foundation and Gallup reports that 86 percent of Americans believe there is political bias in news coverage; a full 49 percent see “a great deal” of bias. And 75 percent of Americans see bias in news that’s supposed to be objective as a “major problem.” Nearly 8 in 10 Americans (79 percent) say “news organizations they distrust are trying to persuade people to adopt a certain viewpoint.”

Never was this more apparent than during the 2020 election, when the media outdid themselves in lying, cheating, sowing doubt, and confusion. After five years of complete abandonment of journalistic principles, you have to wonder how many of these people are genuinely going mad. Trafficking in lies and calling them true — as in the old Soviet commie publication, Pravda (Russian: “Truth”) — will kill the soul. All to sway an American election:

Disinformation

• “There’s a wave coming. A blue wave like the one in 2018. Only bigger. Much bigger.” — Bill Schneider, in The Hill, 7/20/20
• “After the George Floyd murder and Trump’s response, the notion of gains with African American voters is highly unlikely.” — John Harris, Politico, 7/30/20. (Turned out, Trump made significant gains with minorities.)
• “Blue Wave Builds: How Far Will It Reach?” — The Los Angeles Times, 10/9/20
• “There is mounting evidence that a Democrat tsunami is forming.” — Brian A. Howey, The Greenfield [IN] Daily Reporter,10/15/20
• “Wall Street Increasingly Expects a ‘Blue Wave’ in Next Month’s Election.” — cbs News, 10/16/20
• “In Florida … The New York Times poll showed Biden beating President Trump by three points, and Reuters showed him winning by four points. Instead, Trump won the state by more than three. In Pennsylvania … the nbc News/Marist survey predicted a five-point Biden victory; instead, the race is down to the wire. In Wisconsin, pre-election polls showed the former vice president up almost seven points. The Post/abc News poll projected a 17-point Biden thrashing, while The Times predicted an 11-point Biden victory. Trump appears to have lost by just 21,000 votes.” — aei, 11/6/20
• “In Maine … [polls] showed [Sen. Susan Collins] losing by six, seven, and even 12 points. Instead, she crushed her opponent by more than seven points. In North Carolina, with the exception of …Trafalgar … not a single poll in the past month showed Sen. Thom Tillis (R) winning his race [though he won by 2 points —100,000 votes] … In Iowa, [‘endangered’] Sen. Joni Ernst (R) … won by nearly seven points. In Montana, Sen. Steve Daines (R) … won by 10 [defying media polls which had him in a nail-biter] … Republicans won almost every toss-up in the House — picking up at least six seats and leaving Democrats with the slimmest House majority in 20 years.” — aei, 11/6/20

Outright Lies

• “Why Trump Might Quit.” — Politico, predicting negative media polls could force Trump out of the race over the summer, 7/30/20
• “It’s important to recognize that Trump is now in a much worse position than he was four years ago, parallels aside.” — Philip Bump, ignoring the fact that the media declared that Trump had zip, zero, nada chance of winning four years ago, The Washington Post, 10/6/20
• “The [Trump] Administration’s hyper-confrontational policies against … regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have met no success at all in changing the leadership or political landscape in those countries, but they did deliver the United States’ most crucial electoral prize to the President. Trump’s surprisingly comfortable win in the Sunshine State is a testament to his insight that if you want to win big among those exile communities, macho posturing is a better political strategy than careful diplomacy.” — Francisco Toro, “Florida Was Always the Cynical Goal Behind Trump’s Disastrous Latin America Policies,” The Washington Post, 11/4/20
• “This is why people are boarding up the stores because [Trump] sends a message to his supporters that when the true count comes out, maybe it will be in his favor … if it’s not in his favor, he has already planted the seed that this election has been stolen from him.” — Gayle King, blaming Trump for store owners in Democrat-run cities protecting their property against Antifa and blm, cbs election night coverage, quoted at Cleveland.com, 11/4/20
• “breaking: The Fox News Decision Desk can now project that Democrats will retain control of the House of Representatives and expand their majority by at least five seats.” — Fox News, at 9:17 p.m. on election night, 11/3/20. As we go to press, Democrats appear to be on track for about a 14-seat loss from last Congress, leaving them with a historically weak 221 (D) to 214 (R) margin, give or take.
• “There’s not actually much evidence that polls are becoming less accurate… 2016 and 2020 polling errors were slightly worse than average but within a fairly normal range.” — Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight, on Twitter, 11/10/20. The truth is, the polls were so inaccurate — again — that the entire industry is a laughingstock.

Race Propaganda

• “The Relentless Shrinking of Trump’s Base.” — The New York Times, 10/22/20, forecasting that minorities would flee the gop as “uneducated whites” vanished; but as Democrat data expert David Shor admitted after the election, “The joke [on Democrats] is that the gop is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of.”
• “Our data shows [the suburban women who voted for Trump in 2016] more than faded, it’s been a large swing. Why have you lost women in that way?” — Margaret Brennan to gop chair Ronna McDaniel, discussing pre-election polling on Face the Nation, 11/1/20. But as reported by Breitbart, Trump dramatically increased his share among blacks, Latinos, and women. In fact, women and nonwhites comprised a 59.6 percent majority of Trump voters.
• “The Republican Party is going up against demography — it’s like a python slowly squeezing it to death. There are not enough white people to survive.” — Mike Murphy, NeverTrump gop strategist, ignoring the gop’s increase in minority voters, The Washington Post, 11/4/20
• “Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with their oppressors.” — Charles Blow, The New York Times, 11/4/20. As reported by Slate, Trump received 18 percent of the black male vote and 36 percent of Latino men.
• “Trump thrilled many white Republicans by challenging the legitimacy of the first black President with a lie about his place of birth…” — Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, claiming Biden desires to “heal the country,” but the divisions are Trump’s fault, The Washington Post, 11/4/20
• “We no longer have poll taxes and grandfather clauses to disenfranchise black voters, but gop officials modernized the barriers to voting by people of color. One careful study published in Scientific American last year found that voters in predominantly black neighborhoods are 74 percent more likely to have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote than residents of white neighborhoods.” — Nicholas Kristoff, The New York Times, 11/4/20 citing a study that says absolutely nothing about the gop. In fact, urban black neighborhood voting sites are virtually all run by Democrats.
• “Racism is Trump’s brand — but he outperformed the polls in large part with Hispanic and some black votes.” — Paul Krugman, on Twitter, 11/5/20
• “The President, using many different dog whistles during the campaign, presented himself as the leader of America’s shrinking white majority.” — Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, 11/5/20
• “This [misunderstanding the pro-Trump Latino vote] isn’t just about how politicians woo some voters while taking others for granted; it’s also about how the news media sees and reports on these groups.” — Isvett Verde, Latina reporter, “Some Latinos Voted for Trump, Get Over It,” in The New York Times, 11/5/20. The media couldn’t believe that many Latino communities went for Trump. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, 52.5 percent of Zapata County Texas, with a 95 percent Latino population, voted Trump. The blind spot was so bad that on 11/9/20 The New York Times had to run “How Democrats Missed Trump’s Appeal to Latino Voters.”

Orange Man Bad

• “Trump Is Drowning in His Own Lies.” — Greg Sargent, in The Washington Post, 10/23/20
• “Why Evangelicals Should Care About Trump’s Lies (and Other Sins).” — John Avlon, at cnn, 10/24/20
• “Trump Has Weaponized Masculinity as President.” — npr, 10/28/20
• “If the need to appear tough causes a President to not just disagree with but demonize the other party — to belittle them with nicknames like ‘Crazy Nancy’ Pelosi or ‘Cryin’ Chuck’ Schumer, for example — it’s easy to see how it could fuel polarization. It’s noteworthy that President Trump seems to have a gendered pattern to his putdowns: he tends to belittle male opponents as weak, saying they are ‘cryin’ or ‘little’ or ‘low-energy,’ whereas he often insults women’s looks or casts them as hysterical.” — npr, 10/28/20
• “We still do not know who is the winner of the Presidential election. But we do know who is the loser: the United States of America. We have just experienced four years of the most divisive and dishonest Presidency in American history, which attacked the twin pillars of our democracy — truth and trust. Donald Trump has not spent a single day of his term trying to be President of all the people, and he has broken rules and trashed norms in ways that no other President ever dared.” — Thomas “Loopy” Friedman, The New York Times, 11/5/20
• “It just seems to be that if the name ‘Donald Trump’ is on the ballot, all bets are off when it comes to the polls being right.” — Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth University Polling Institute, blaming Trump for the entire polling industry getting it wrong again in 2020, Politico, 11/6/20
• “Now We Have to Fight Trump’s Tin-Pot Coup.” — Naomi Klein, The Intercept, 11/13/20

Orange Man’s Voters Bad

• “How is it that so many millions of Americans watched Trump for four years, suffered the pain of his bungling of covid-19, listened to his stream of lies, observed his attacks on American institutions — and then voted for him in greater numbers than before?” — Nicholas Kristoff, The New York Times, 11/4/20
• “Trump may be denied a second term but he has demonstrated beyond a doubt that he is leading a personality- and grievance-based movement that continues to have startling vitality — much more than suggested by pre-election polls and pundit forecasts.” — Politico, 11/4/20
• “There’s a tendency to emphasize that Trump is a unique threat to American democracy, which he is. But this ignores that his rise was made possible by a conservative movement that saw the country slipping through its fingers and decided to fight a war for minority rule. And it worked… Florida stands as the perfect example of how the gop’s toxic brew of disinformation, democracy-busting, and racial dog whistles leads to narrow but consistent victories.” — Jason Sattler, usa Today, 11/4/20
• “After all that Donald Trump has done, all the misery he has caused, all the racism he has aroused, all the immigrant families he has destroyed, all the people who have left this life because of his mismanagement of a pandemic, still roughly half of the country voted to extend this horror show… It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists.” — Charles Blow, The New York Times, 11/4/20
• “[T]he gay social network Hornet … found that 45 percent of the gay men on it planned to vote for Trump… [T]his to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest thumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors and will aspire to power by proximity.” — Charles Blow, The New York Times, 11/4/20
• “These days, I am reminded quite often that you do not have to be white to support white supremacy.” — Eugene Scott, Washington Post reporter, after Trump significantly increased his share of the minority vote, on Twitter, 11/4/20
• “[H]ow the hell could American voters have picked Trump to be President to begin with? And how, after four years of his Fib-a-Minute Administration, could they have come even remotely close to re-electing him?” — Gail Collins, The New York Times, 11/4/20
• “[I]t’s aggravating … because we’ve been reporting for five years, Rachel, about Russia, about … undermining our national security … the impeachment, the racism, the Nazis, all of it. And then covid laying on top of it felt like a repudiation was coming. And I think even though we intellectually understand what America is at its base, right, that there is a great amount of racism, anti-blackness, anti-wokeness, this idea that political correctness is some sort of scheme to destroy white America, right, like we know what this country is, but still part of … your heart says, you know what, maybe the country’s going to pay off all of this pain… [But] as the night wore on and I realized and it sunk in, okay, that [repudiation] is not happening, we are still who we thought, unfortunately… It’s disappointing.” — Joy Reid, on the Rachel Maddow Show, complaining about the closeness of the 2020 presidential election, quoted at Townhall, 11/5/20
• “[W]e’ve been slapped with the heartbreaking reality that nearly half our country voted for President Donald Trump after spending four years watching him spew unbridled bigotry, engage in blatant corruption, and tell so many lies you’d need a magnifying glass to read The Washington Post’s running list of false and misleading claims.” — Michael Stern, usa Today,11/5/20
• “I can’t believe that nearly half my fellow Americans tried to reelect a man so singularly focused on satisfying himself, he’d bite his mother’s breast if sweeter milk caught his eye. When all is said and done, Trump may be defeated in a close call. But I fear Trumpism, and the ugliness it reflects, is here to stay.” — Michael Stern, usa Today, 11/5/20

Lies of Omission

• “A new post-election poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, shows 36 percent of Biden voters were not aware of the evidence linking Joe Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter.” — NewsBusters, 11/9/20
• “cnn: stories mentioning the Steele Dossier: 158; stories mentioning Michael Avenatti: 429; stories mentioning Tony Bobulinski: 0.” — Tim Murtaugh, Trump campaign communications director, tracking media suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop whistleblower story, on Twitter, 10/29/20
• “Facebook Throttled Hunter Biden Article after Being Warned by fbi of ‘Hack and Leak’ Operations, Mark Zuckerberg Says.” — usa Today, 10/28/20
• “The failure of the three evening newscasts to cover this [Hunter Biden laptop] story is especially glaring. Over the 14-day period the three evening news broadcasts aired 27 newscasts without mentioning the Hunter Biden scandal.” — NewsBusters, “Nets Spend a Meager 21 Minutes Out of 113 Hours on Biden Scandals,” 10/27/20
• “Mr. Biden hasn’t had to explain [the Hunter Biden laptop]. His protectors aren’t relegated to the media. They also encompass the Big Tech heads, who quickly cracked down on dissemination of The [New York] Post story itself. Twitter banned tweeting of the link and suspended accounts that tried to spread it, including that of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Facebook announced that even though the story hadn’t been fact-checked or found to be false, the company would suppress its reach… There is no doubt that Big Tech’s decision was political — or that the media’s hesitancy to cover the Biden allegations is similarly political.” — Ben Shapiro, “The Media Officially Becomes the Communications Department for Joe Biden,” in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10/26/20
• “[T]wo mainstream reporters who acknowledged (and criticized) The [New York] Post’s scoop — The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Politico’s Jake Sherman — faced thunderous denunciation … from Democratic partisans simply for discussing the story. Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden accused Haberman of promoting disinformation, and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg told Sherman that he was helping nefarious conservative activists ‘launder this bulls–t into the news cycle.’” — Reason, “The Media Do Not Want You to Read, Share, or Discuss The New York Post’s Hunter Biden Scoop,” 10/14/20

“No Fraud” Gaslighting

• “There’s No Evidence of Fraud in Mail-In Ballots, Part Infinity.” — cnn, 9/17/20
• “[T]his is something we’ve dealt with for quite some time with this President. And especially when it comes to the elections process, we’ve seen a lot of false statements, whether it’s about distrust of the mail voting system, the existence of alleged fraud that we know doesn’t exist…” — David Becker, cbs election night, quoted at NewsBusters, 11/3/20
• “The President of the United States, castrating the facts of the election results … falsely claiming that he has won the election and disenfranchising millions of voters whose ballots have not been counted…” — Norah O’Donnell, election night coverage, cbs News Facebook, 11/3/20
• “Our Founding Fathers are probably rolling in their graves right now. They did not envision a President of the United States delegitimizing an American election.” — Jim Acosta, on cnn, quoted at Yahoo News, 11/4/20
• “Trump’s latest attack on the integrity of America’s electoral system and on the peaceful transfer of power — the litmus test for any democracy — comes after years of other lies and efforts to discredit the electoral system.” — Nicholas Kristoff, The New York Times, 11/4/20
• “This is disinformation on the level that has not been seen from the Presidential podium in the East Room of the White House in my lifetime and potentially in the history of this nation.” — Shepard Smith, cnbc election night coverage, Cleveland.com, 11/4/20
• “This isn’t politics, this is theater. Let’s be blunt. It’s the theater of authoritarianism… The President of the United States, no matter what he says, is trying to stop the counting of valid votes, the ordinary, everyday counting of valid votes.” — Terry Moran, abc reporter, Cleveland.com, 11/4/20
• “The President and his allies have baselessly claimed that rampant voter fraud stole victory from him.” — The New York Times, ignoring multiple-state vote-switching “glitches,” tabulation anomalies, and hundreds of sworn witness affidavits, 11/10/20
• “70% of Republicans Say Election Wasn’t ‘Free and Fair’ Despite No Evidence of Fraud — Study.” — The [UK] Guardian,11/10/20
• “election officials nationwide find no fraud.” — The New York Times, front-page banner headline, 11/11/20
• “Debunked: Dead Voters’ Ballots Not Evidence of Widespread U.S. Election Fraud.” — Euronews, 11/12/20. According to the article, “experts” say that even “if there were irregularities, they would not have affected the election result.” And besides, “there are multiple explanations for why voters can be registered with unusually old birth dates, including software errors and voter confidentiality issues.” Right. And among the “multiple explanations” for 120-year-old voters, here’s mine: Democrat fraud.

You have to wonder how these so-called journalists sleep at night, with all their intentional deception, disinformation, fabrication, and distortions to serve the agenda of the hard-left Democrat Party. In the old totalitarian ussr, reporters didn’t have a choice; but the American Pravda drive-bys do. Of their own free will they’ve surrendered their talents, their objectivity, their spirit of free inquiry, and even their curiosity to the socialist hive mind; they have become the totalitarians.

Propaganda image ©2020 Shutterstock; Cartoon ©2020 by permission of Gary Varvel and Creators Syndicate, Inc.