Eight years ago, the leftist media took great offense to being dismissed by Donald Trump as “fake news,” but they never seemed to grasp this is exactly how they painted the conservative media, as truth-defying propaganda outlets.
When the Trump trial turned to the National Enquirer, we could find national unity that the Enquirer defines “fake news.” The lefties are very excited to remind voters how the Enquirer was a Trump-allied tabloid full of garbage stories. But the liberal media spread some of them.
In May 2016, the Enquirer uncorked some garbage that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had cheated on his wife. ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined 15-and-a-half minutes spreading the word of this character assassination campaign.
The pro-Biden “media reporters” were still upset last week about the Enquirer and how it played “catch and kill” with Trump accusers, squelching stories that might embarrass Trump. NPR’s David Folkenflik complained to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that burying salacious stories is “not a journalistic impulse, it’s not even a tabloid gossip impulse, this is essentially a partisan or propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign in all but name.”
This is coming from NPR, which aggressively trashed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “pure distraction.” Folkenflik engaged with the story only to dismiss it as “a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor.”
When The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories acknowledging Hunter’s laptop was real in March and April 2022, Folkenflik didn’t file a story with his regrets. He just kept attacking Fox News, his usual bread and butter.
So on the Hunter laptop, we can throw it back in Folkenflik’s face—NPR’s suppression was not a journalistic impulse, and NPR was essentially a propagandistic arm of the Biden campaign in all but name.
Worse yet, we fund it with our taxes. That gravy train should end.
Ex-CNN reporter Brian Stelter said the same thing on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show about the Enquirer: “It has nothing to do with journalism.” David Pecker’s “not a news man. He’s an advertiser! He’s a marketer, and his product was Donald Trump.” Thanks, Sherlock Stelter. Nobody should define Pecker as a news man.
Like Folkenflik, Stelter squashed the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 as a Murdoch plot, or as a Russian disinformation campaign, because CNN’s a marketer and its product was anyone but Trump (meaning President Joe Biden).
Stelter also showed up on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show. Wagner was hopping mad, asking what’s the point of a gag order on Trump when you have a “media-industrial complex that is effectively acting as a public defense line” for Trump? Once again, Wagner can’t imagine MSNBC acting as a “media-industrial complex” for the Democrats.
So, does Wagner wish the judge could issue a gag order for the entire conservative media landscape? No criticism allowed of the get-Trump prosecutors and judge? I thought this was a democracy.
Stelter broke out the usual bravado that the liberals live on “Earth One,” and they must see what’s happening on “Earth Two,” which is an alternative universe of hallucinations. Stelter claimed, “For Jesse Watters, Trump is God, and that is the programming every hour of every day on these other networks.”
That sounds like some crazy religion. Would Stelter survive a little fact-check on whether Fox and Newsmax perpetually pray hourly to the Orange Lord and Savior? Both sides suggest the other side of the media is fake. But both sides are slinging a lot of opinionated hot takes, and Stelter can certainly flip a flapjack on that skillet.
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In the earlier decades of the Public Broadcasting Service, conservatives could feel that they had some fraction of a platform on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line.”
That PBS presence no doubt spurred the makers of the “American Masters” series to offer a two-hour program titled “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” In the opening credits, they typed in “Insufferable” first, then crossed it out. That word reflects the view of the political and financial base of PBS.
Fans of Buckley might enjoy the video clips of Buckley jousting with the elites in the 20th century, but the style of this show was annoying in that whenever experts were speaking, they were entirely off-screen.
This documentary by Barak Goodman is neither a valentine to Buckley, nor a fair and balanced recitation of his life and times. Conservatives are interviewed, but the final product carries the distinct odor of PBS’ liberal arrogance.
In the tainted timeline of this program, Buckley triumphs with the election of Ronald Reagan and then the end of the Cold War, and then it’s all downhill for the troglodytes on the Right.
Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice speaks over footage of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh about conservatism being taken to an extreme as the Republicans took Congress in 1994.
Gingrich, he claims, “teaches Republicans to talk in a new way about Democrats being a source of infection and disease and disloyalty and decay.” Then there’s footage of Limbaugh making fun of the “ugly broads” of feminism.
Over ominous music implying villainy, Kabaservice argues, “Buckley did endorse Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. At some level, he understood that politics requires emotion, as well as intellect, and maybe it requires dark emotions and even hatreds.”
This would match the spirit of PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” where the liberal Republican puts on guests like journalist Tim Alberta, who recently denounced the Limbaugh show as poisoning Christians with “an unceasing stream of venom and ugliness and hostility, antagonism, hatred.”
Leftists have an annoying habit of thinking fear and loathing and ugliness and venom are somehow unique to the Republican half of America. They, by contrast, are apparently all sugar and spice and everything nice.
Have they watched five minutes of “The Reidout” or “The View”? Both sides (and center-huggers like Kabaservice) are capable of love and hatred, comfort and fear, civility and incivility.
But on PBS, they must locate experts to slam Buckley for “tolerating and sometimes even encouraging some of the nastier, more extreme aspects on the Right … by the end, it was clear the nastier forces had won out.” There’s no name on screen to figure out who’s the mudslinger here.
PBS can never be judged for encouraging the nastier, more extreme aspects of the Left, because in their bubble, no one is ever nasty or extreme where they reside, in a perfect Eden of politics.
Kabaservice returns for the final pitch on that “dark side” of the conservative movement, which was “white Americans” didn’t like “change” (because they were racists, apparently): “Buckley understood that it was part of his role to keep a lid on the dark energies that fueled the conservative movement, but not to repress them entirely, because it was those kind of resentments that he was drawing on that gave conservatism its power as a movement.”
Once again, PBS thinks the Democrats get their power from warm wellsprings of idealism and compassion. The Republicans get theirs from nurturing racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
Watching this program gives this conservative one overwhelming reaction: I want my involuntary contributions to PBS refunded. Insult me with someone else’s money.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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They call themselves the “PBS NewsHour,” but if you watch them routinely, you might call them the “PBS Opposition Research Hour.”
They often sound like a Democrat consulting firm as they analyze former President Donald Trump as a dangerously extreme figure. Then they can turn around and proclaim that President Joe Biden is very bipartisan in negotiating “objectively historical achievements,” as PBS anchor Amna Nawaz claimed at the State of the Union address.
On April 2, PBS aired a segment titled “Analyzing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.” Two days later, it was changed to “Anatomy of a Trump speech.”
They decided to watch all the scary passages in Trump’s recent speeches with Jennifer Mercieca, who reporter Lisa Desjardins blandly described as “an author and Texas A&M professor who specializes in political and Trump rhetoric.”
PBS didn’t note that Mercieca wrote a book in 2020 titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” (It was shown on screen.) Its dust cover promises to explain “how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America’s authoritarian P.T. Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.”
Does this expert shopping sound fair and balanced to anyone?
As Trump denounced Biden for a “border bloodbath,” Desjardins explained he’s attacking “anyone who calls it a humanitarian crisis.” Mercieca lamented, “It can’t be neutral. It can’t be a situation at the border. It has to be violent. It has to be an invasion. It has to be a bloodbath.”
Seriously? Last October, their anchor Nawaz wasn’t neutral as she compared separating children from their families at the border under Trump as “one of the darkest chapters in our modern history” that echoed slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans.
Naturally, Desjardins repeated the Democrat spin that “there’s no evidence of a bloodbath for Americans living there” (at the border), and “multiple studies show that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than others here.”
Trump lamented, “If we don’t win on Nov. 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have.” Desjardins explained Mercieca’s thesis: This is “what separates Trump,” it’s not “political razzle-dazzle, but dangerous, hyperbolic fearmongering.”
If that “last election” talk is dangerous, will PBS rewind to Biden’s first campaign speech back on Jan. 5? Biden said of Trump: “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power … Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future. … We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”
These “public” broadcasters know what Biden has said in his campaign speeches, and they’re fine with it. No one thinks it’s a lie or that it’s dangerous. Mercieca acknowledged, “All presidents run as heroes. It’s not uncommon. Joe Biden is running as a hero right now. He’s running as a hero to save democracy.” But she claimed, “Donald Trump is running as a different kind of hero.”
How so? Desjardins concluded the segment with this about Trump: “When he’s saying the situation is dire, when he’s saying democracy will end if I’m not elected, he is implying to some of his followers, violence may be OK.”
Biden is saying democracy will end if he’s not elected, but PBS can’t imagine his followers would ever believe “violence may be OK.” PBS makes “news” by Democrats, for Democrats. But it’s subsidized involuntarily by tens of millions of allegedly democracy-squashing Republicans.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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