“How about the press? … They’ve gone silent now. They have a new thing. They used to fight me left and right … but people would hear [the story]. Now they don’t want to talk about it… They went stone cold silent. Big Tech, the fake news media, they go silent … and that is the beginning of communism. That’s exactly what happens.” — Donald Trump, Georgia rally speech, 1/4/21

“Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” — David “Iowahawk” Burge, humorist, on Twitter

I’ve been saying it for a long time: there is no news. I don’t care if you go to cnn, msnbc, abc, cbs, nbc, The New York Times, The Washington Post, there literally isn’t any news. Journalism — in which somebody documents an event and tells other people about it — isn’t practiced anymore, other than by me (see “I Am a Reporter” in this issue).

Today we have left-wing activists disguised as journalists promoting the agenda of the Democrat Party; it’s just made to look like news. I’ve long called this the drive-by media, where so-called journalists arrive on the scene of a breaking story and stir emotions to a frenzy. They agitate and spread lies, and after the real facts emerge, they’re gone. They’re down the road wreaking havoc in the next story. They’ve lately been functioning as hit-and-run drivers, leaving victims, anger, and division in their wake.

This has been the dangerous trend for years, but it hit defcon 1 after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. As the communication arm of the Democrat party, the media’s only mission today is to advance the agenda of the left while tricking the public into imagining they’re watching actual reporting. Their methods are simple and mindless. Suppress or mock any inconvenient truths damaging to the left, like Hunter/Joe Biden corruption or the 2020 election theft. Plant fake stories outright and just make up anonymous sources, as with Russia-gate and Ukraine-gate. Lie incessantly about Trump and his supporters as the repository of all that is evil, burying any reportage on his enormous presidential accomplishments.

No wonder only 10 percent of Republicans say they trust the news media, the lowest on record, in the latest Gallup annual survey. A full 60 percent of all Americans have little or no trust in the news media, with trust in reporting at the second-lowest level in 50 years. Similarly, last August Gallup found that 83 percent of Americans think there is significant political bias in news reporting. Indeed, a December Gallup poll finds that only 28 percent of Americans — and only 5 percent of Republicans — think journalists have high honesty and ethical standards.

A perfect example: the absurd contrast between media coverage of the months of violent blm and Antifa riots in 2020 and the hours-long Capitol Hill breach on 1/6/21. While insisting Antifa is just “an idea” and refusing to show footage of much of the mayhem ($2 billion of destruction in which over 30 died), the media cast the leftist riots as “a summer of love” and totally justified — never mind the burning buildings — while in the wake of the Capitol Hill breach, all Trump support needs to be erased from existence:

Leftist Violence Good

• “The whole point of protesting is to make ppl [people] uncomfortable. Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows. To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable — that’s the point.” — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), on Twitter, 12/2/20. aoc’s staff later complained to Twitter that conservatives were retweeting this.
• “Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality, or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s.” — AP Stylebook guidance, discouraging reporters’ use of the word “rioting” to describe blm riots, 9/30/20
• “Trump’s efforts to label what is happening in major cities as ‘riots’ speaks at least somewhat to his desperation, politically speaking, at the moment.” — Chris Cillizza, cnn editor-at-large, comment accompanying news photo of buildings burning in a riot, on Twitter, 8/30/20

• “The ‘riots’ are not Black Lives Matter marches gone wrong. Armed white nationalists are mobbing these cities to take advantage of protests and scare fellow white people into quietly siding with them. It’s an old, tried and true strategy: using fear & anti-blackness for politics.” — Joy Reid, msnbc host, on Twitter, 8/30/20
• “fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” — cnn chyron caption for national correspondent Omar Jimenez reporting from burning car lot during Kenosha, WI riots, via Twitter, 8/27/20
• “I’ve been on the front lines of the protests here, searching for the ‘radical-left anarchists’ who President Trump says are on Portland streets each evening… Sure there are anarchists and Antifa activists in the Portland protests, just as there are radiologists and electricians, lawyers, and mechanics… The protesters aren’t all peaceful, nor are they primarily violent.” — Nicholas Kristof, columnist, The New York Times, 7/29/20
• “People will do what they do.” — Nancy Pelosi, on mob destroying statue of Christopher Columbus, Real Clear Politics, 7/9/20
• “Two days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, city residents stormed a Target, stealing vacuum cleaners and TVs. They burned down an AutoZone and, two days later, an Arby’s. They set squad cars and a police station on fire… A consensus held fast that … property damage was beyond the pale… But that’s the wrong way of thinking about riots, says [UC Davis professor] Joshua Clover [who insists] a riot is a … strike without a workplace.” — Mother Jones, “Riots Aren’t Irrational,” 6/15/20
• “Rioting is inherently American. Throughout U.S. history, from the Boston Tea Party to the ongoing George Floyd protests, demonstrators can be found fighting for change and against oppression on the streets.” — The Huffington Post, “How Riots Built America,” 6/12/20
• “Seattle is fine. Don’t be so afraid of democracy.” — Mayor Jenny Durkan (D, Seattle), on Twitter, 6/12/20
• “Legal and historical experts say that the word riot is a loaded one… ‘Riot suggests pandemonium,’ says john a. powell, a professor of law and African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley (who does not capitalize his name in recognition of its being a slave name). ‘What’s happening across the country and across the world is a call for justice, a call for police accountability, for the recognition that black lives matter too,’ powell says. ‘Rioting detracts from all of that.’” — Time, 6/8/20
• “Nonviolence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence.” — Slate, on Twitter, 6/4/20

​

• “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things, I think is really not moral to do that.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the anti-American “1619 Project,” on cbs News, quoted in The New York Post, 6/3/20
• “Please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful. Because I can show you that outraged citizens are what made the country what she is…” — Chris Cuomo, cnn anchor, quoted in The Washington Examiner, 6/3/20
• “At the core, this is a principled, righteous resistance. This is a marvelous militancy that’s going to lead to some real social change, I do believe.” — Marc Lamont Hill, HuffPost Live and bet News host, Temple University professor of media studies, npr, 6/2/20
• “Why Violent Protests Work.” — GQ, 6/2/20
• “If you’re able to now, chip in now to the [Minnesota] Freedom Fund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” — Kamala Harris, on Twitter, 6/1/20
• “Our country was started because, the Boston Tea Party. Rioting. So do not get it twisted and think this is something that has never happened before and this is so terrible and these savages and all of that. This is how this country was started.” — Don Lemon, cnn, 5/31/20
• “Limit use of the term looting. Some have long viewed the word as carrying racial overtones… Sensitivity is heightened now in light of President Donald Trump’s ‘looting and shooting’ tweet and the history dating to the civil rights era.” — AP Stylebook, via Twitter, 5/31/20
• “I want to be clear on how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly, but fires have been started…” — Ali Velshi, on-scene reporter standing in front of burning building on msnbc during Minneapolis riot, quoted at Fox News, 5/29/20
• “This will guide our reporting in MN. ‘While the situation on the ground in Minneapolis is fluid, and there has been violence, it is most accurate at this time to describe what is happening there as “protests” — not riots.’” — Craig Melvin, nbc reporter, on Twitter, 5/29/20
• “There is no right way to protest… [T]hink about that unease you felt watching that Target being looted. Try to imagine how it must feel for black Americans when they watch themselves being looted every single day.” — Trevor Noah, “The Daily Show” host, on Twitter, 5/29/20
• “When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction.” — Colin Kaepernick, during the Minneapolis riots, on Twitter, 5/28/20
• flashback: “More than 200 youth activists, flanked by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, flooded House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office this morning urging Democrats to act more decisively on climate change. Capitol Police said they arrested 51 protesters for unlawfully demonstrating outside Pelosi’s office in the Cannon House Office Building. The arrests began a few hours after the demonstration began, when protesters refused to leave the area.” — Politico, 11/13/18
• “We welcome the presence of these activists, and we strongly urge the Capitol Police to allow them to continue to organize and participate in our democracy.”— Nancy Pelosi, on climate change activists storming her office, on Twitter, 11/13/18

Trump Support Bad

• “Trump is the spiritual, but I will also say operational leader, of this domestic terrorism effort. He tells them where to go. He tells them what to do. He tells them why they’re angry. And so we need to start at the top, like any counterterrorism effort, which is total isolation of the President of the United States. Impeachment, yes. 25th Amendment, yes. Deplatforming, yes. All of the above. No money. No access to campaign funds. A complete isolation, because as the leader of a terrorist organization is viewed as a loser … it is harder for him to recruit… What we have to make sure is that Donald Trump does not have a second act… Enough with the ‘let’s unity’ and stuff…” — Juliette Kayyem, cnn national security analyst, on cnn, 1/12/21
• “[W]e’re looking at all actors here, and anyone that had a role and the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.” — Michael Sherwin, acting U.S. Attorney for D.C., refusing to rule out criminal charges against President Trump in the Capitol breach, The Lid, 1/11/21. In September, Sherwin dropped charges for all but one of the blm rioters who “spray-painted buildings and set fire to patio umbrellas.”
• “Citing the potential for Trump’s words to incite others — even in the absence of clear references to violence — took Twitter’s enforcement actions to a restrictive new level, as commentators noted… But the fear that Trump’s social media postings were fueling violent action appears to be well founded.” — The Washington Post, 1/9/21. Meanwhile, Twitter hasn’t suspended innumerable Twitter accounts that regularly call for violence, including that of the Ayatollah Khamenei.
• “It has been an epiphany for the world to see that there are people in our country led by this President, for the moment, who have chosen their whiteness over democracy.” — Nancy Pelosi, AP, 1/9/21
• “Plenty of media people, along with plenty of Democratic leaders, spent [days] arguing that Trump gave the protesters the idea to storm the Capitol, that he egged them on and incited them. But the media, which sowed the wind all year long with loose talk about riots, did far more to bring down the whirlwind … than Trump did. When you argue for months and months that there’s nothing wrong with rioting or mob action or fighting with the police, and that we have to try to understand the rioters and their complaints, don’t be surprised if a certain segment of the population takes you at your word.” — The Federalist, 1/8/21
• “The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.” — Rick Klein, abc News political director, since-deleted post, on Twitter, 1/7/21
• “The reason this was allowed to happen is [because] white people in America have always gotten what they wanted. From stealing Native American land to burning black property/businesses. America has always taken what they want & now we see they’ll even eat their own to get what they want.” — Shannon Sharpe, co-host of Fox Sports “Undisputed,” claiming the Capitol breach was due to white people not getting the President they wanted, on Twitter, 1/7/21

• “Trump Incites Rioters: The President may use the language of patriotism, but these are the actions of Benedict Arnold.” — Nicholas Kristof, columnist, The New York Times, 1/6/21
• “Every person who forced their way into the Capitol should be arrested. Lock them all up.” — German Lopez, Vox, 1/6/21. In 2016, Lopez wrote in the same publication that riots “can be part of a coherent political movement” and that “we need to take their causes seriously.”
• “This assault is just that. It shows the weakness of those who’ve had to show through violence what their message was.” — Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), speaker.gov, 1/6/21
• “Those who performed these reprehensible acts cannot be called protesters — no, these were rioters and insurrectionists, goons and thugs, domestic terrorists… They must and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” — Sen. Chuck Schumer (D, NY), U.S. News, 1/6/21. As The Federalist reports, Schumer led the charge to block Sen. Mike Lee’s (R, UT) resolution aimed at curbing mob violence during the blm riots.
• “Stop saying that we must respect Trump supporters who believe bullsh*t.” — Don Lemon, cnn anchor, on election fraud claims, quoted at Breitbart, 1/4/21
• “We should not — for the rest of their careers — refer to any of these Republican [Electoral College] objectors as ‘conservatives.’ They are radicals. They are extremists. There is nothing conservative about subverting democracy.” — Tim Alberta, Politico chief political correspondent, on Twitter, 1/3/21
• “You can’t heal or reform the gop who are now an extremist party. They have to be broken, burned down and rebuilt. When Biden is in power treat them like the active threats to democracy they are.” — Wajahat Ali, New York Times writer, on Twitter, 11/9/20

nbc’s “Meet the Depressed” host F. Chuck Todd took to Politico on 1/17/21 to scold us: “One of the laziest tropes in conservative circles is the issue of media bias. It’s such a reflexive response these days. It’s about all many conservative infotainment hosts on TV and radio have left to fire up an audience… It’s obviously hard to watch the media get abused this way so a few grifters can sell more newsletters or scam a few bucks.”

You know who fires up my audience, Chuck old buddy old pal? You do. My audience is fit to be tied over your industry’s deceptions and your totalitarian impulses to shut people up, and they’re eager to seek out someone who tells the truth. That would be me.

Cartoon ©2021 Pat Cross patcrosscartoons.com