The 2020 campaign has been so contorted by the coronavirus that the Democrats and Republicans are still figuring out how on Earth they&#8217;ll hold virtual conventions. Now imagine how it could make a mess out of November.
As President Donald Trump bizarrely tweeted about delaying the election, the media are starting to admit that mail-in voting might not turn out very well. People inherently know from experience that trusting the U.S. Postal Service with their vote sounds sketchy. Almost everyone has lost something they sent in the mail.
A month ago, The New York Times was throwing the usual darts at Trump for tweeting that mail-in voting would lead to fraud. It was spewing &#8220;fact-checks&#8221; in staunch defense of the integrity of mail-in voting.
Then, reality intruded. The Times published a story headlined &#8220;Mail Carrier in West Virginia Pleads Guilty to Attempted Election Fraud.&#8221; Then it was forced to report from its own city on July 17. The headline and subheading were blunt: &#8220;3 Weeks After Primary, N.Y. Officials Still Can&#8217;t Say Who Won Key Races: Tens of thousands of absentee ballots in New York are still uncounted and many races have yet to be called. What will November look like?&#8221;
Two Times reporters lamented it was &#8220;absurd&#8221; that ballots had been barely counted: &#8220;In the 12th Congressional District, where Representative Carolyn B. Maloney is fighting for her political life against her challenger, Suraj Patel, only 800 of some 65,000 absentee ballots had been tabulated.&#8221; Even now, the Associated Press hasn&#8217;t declared a winner between these Democrats.
This does not inspire confidence. It leaves too much time for cynical conspiracies about manipulation of the results.
The first and foremost reason for these delays is the number of absentee ballots: More than 400,000 were mailed for the June New York City primary, compared with just 76,000 counted in the city in the 2008 presidential election. Now imagine this deluge nationwide. Do we really want to wait weeks to figure out who won which races?
CBS News also attempted to explain how mail-in voting may not be ideal. &#8220;CBS This Morning&#8221; co-host Tony Dokoupil reported that they attempted to mail 100 mock ballots to a post office box in Philadelphia. The early results were terrible. &#8220;Twenty-one percent of our votes hadn&#8217;t materialized after four days,&#8221; he said. That number eventually improved after CBS begged postal workers for assistance, but the test concluded with a shocking 3% failure rate.
Dokoupil concluded: &#8220;(T)hat means three people who tried to vote by mail in our mock election were, in fact, disenfranchised by mail. In a close election, 3% could be pivotal, especially in what&#8217;s expected to be a record year for mail-in voting.&#8221;
This kind of journalism looks like an attempt to test the system &#8220;without fear or favor.&#8221; CBS took the chance to experiment with it and then shared the results even when they weren&#8217;t inspiring, at a time when reporters have stormed around saying there is &#8220;no evidence&#8221; that elections might be hampered.
Voting is a right and an honor, and this year, people have risked their health and stood in long lines to participate in our democracy. The prospect of an orderly election with results the people can have confidence in is looking grim.
In 1984, I cast my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan with an absentee ballot mailed home to Wisconsin. My father regretted to inform me, after Reagan won in a landslide, that my vote wasn&#8217;t counted. That wasn&#8217;t heartbreaking, but if this election gets messy and isn&#8217;t a landslide, we&#8217;re going to have heartbreak, angst and rage.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Mail-in ballots

GRAHAM: Will Democracy Seem Lost In The Mail?

2020 Election

Donald Trump

Joe Biden

mail-in voting

Four years ago this week, the leftists at WikiLeaks tried to ruin the Democratic convention by posting a trove of emails exposing how the Democratic National Committee blatantly favored Hillary Clinton and tilted against Bernie Sanders. But even then, the media downplayed the juiciest tidbits for conservatives: emails in Clinton aide John Podesta&#8217;s account that demonstrated how shamelessly reporters and Democrats work hand in hand to shape the &#8220;news.&#8221; Some might even say it sounds fake.
For example:
1. ABC&#8217;s George Stephanopoulos harshly interviewed &#8220;Clinton Cash&#8221; author Peter Schweizer on his Sunday show on April 26, 2015. In an email, Clinton campaign staffer Jesse Ferguson boasted that Stephanopoulos &#8220;refuted&#8221; Schweizer and wrote: &#8220;Great work everyone. This interview is perfect. He lands nothing and everything is refuted (mostly based on our work).&#8221;
Stephanopoulos didn&#8217;t just donate to The Clinton Foundation. He donated at the office.
2. Maggie Haberman was singled out as a pliant recycler of the Clinton narratives. Podesta wrote: &#8220;We have &#8230; a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed.&#8221;
Now match that with how Haberman is the heroic challenger of all things Donald Trump for The New York Times. She&#8217;s not a journalist first; she never disappoints at teeing up stories for Democrats.
3. CNBC anchor Becky Quick — who helped moderate the atrocious CNBC Republican primary debate in 2015 — made a promise to Podesta after then-President Barack Obama nominated Sylvia Mathews Burwell for health and human services secretary, saying she would &#8220;make sure to defend her when things get further along in the nomination process.&#8221;
4. Before the release of a Clinton profile in July 2016, Mark Leibovich of The New York Times Magazine told Clinton communications director Jen Palmieri, &#8220;you could veto what you didn&#8217;t want.&#8221; At the end of an email, Palmieri listed her vetoes and then shot back like a demanding boss: &#8220;Let me know if that is not clear. Working from an iPhone on the plane so am not able to access the transcript to cut and paste.&#8221;
The Clinton campaign got cut-and-paste privileges!
Leibovich had quoted Clinton talking about eating moose stew and mocking Sarah Palin on her moose chatter. Palmieri instructed: &#8220;Fine to use the moose, but appreciate leaving the mention of Sarah Palin out.&#8221; She also instructed Leibovich to change a Clinton quote about gay rights.
&#8220;Pleasure doing business!&#8221; Palmieri oozed.
If you think this sort of collusion isn&#8217;t happening right now between Biden&#8217;s aides and the journalists who want Trump bounced from office, then you&#8217;re dreaming. Even worse, CBS brought on Leibovich to discuss WikiLeaks &#8230; and never mentioned any of this!
In February 2016, the website Gawker published a cache of emails between reporters and Clinton PR operative Phillippe Reines. The best example was Marc Ambinder, a longtime ABC and CBS reporter then with The Atlantic.
In July 2009, Clinton was delivering a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ambinder wanted an advance copy of the speech. Reines insisted on conditions. &#8220;You must describe her tone as &#8216;muscular,&#8217; and you must note that her most prominent underlings at the State Department (George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke) would be seated in front of her to convey her command of the staff,&#8221; he said.
&#8220;Got it,&#8221; Ambinder replied. Later that day, he published a story in which he Xeroxed the Clinton spin right at the top, touting a &#8220;muscular speech&#8221; Clinton would deliver that day in front of her rival &#8220;power centers&#8221; in the State Department.
This is how reporters are exploited by anonymous &#8220;senior administration officials&#8221; to set the table for Democrats, whether they are in power or not.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Fake News

GRAHAM: The Real Collusion Scandal Of The 2016 Campaign

2016 election

Hillary Clinton

Media Bias

For many Americans, the most painful consequence of the coronavirus lockdowns is the closing of church services. The grace and peace of Sunday makes it easier to make it through the week. But our media and political elites are indifferent to that pain, or openly hostile.
The New York Times recently proclaimed in a headline, &#8220;Churches Emerge as Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.&#8221; A three-reporter team announced the newspaper constructed a database to count church-spawned infections as the &#8220;virus rages&#8221; and blamed 650 infections across America on church activities. How is this a &#8220;major source&#8221; of cases?
Most regular churchgoers didn&#8217;t want to fit into that secular-media stereotype of being so fanatically trusting in God&#8217;s protection that they would gather unmasked in churches and share hugs and handshakes. They were willing to observe lockdowns as a public health necessity.
But then came the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd that clogged the streets. Suddenly, mass gatherings were not only allowed; they were praised and glorified on a global scale. The coronavirus counters dropped off cable-news screens.
There won&#8217;t be a headline in The New York Times that reads, &#8220;Protests Emerge as Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.&#8221; The Times created no database to warn of any dangerously disobedient and unscientific citizens among the &#8220;progressives.&#8221;
Instead, the newspapers proclaimed there was little evidence to suggest massive street protests were spreading the virus. &#8220;Public health experts&#8221; exempted protests from their danger zone, and some even marched themselves.
It&#8217;s a blatant double standard that strongly suggests that in today&#8217;s America, protests are the most sacred activity, far more sacred than Americans gathering to worship God. But not all protests, obviously. Protesting the lockdowns in May was pitched as a dangerously nutty exercise of the First Amendment. CNN&#8217;s warning headline on screen was &#8220;Protesters, Some Armed, Descend on Michigan Capitol.&#8221;
Leftist protesters never &#8220;descend on&#8221; places. In May, CNN cued up Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to describe how the people protesting her restrictions were a band of scary, gun-lugging extremists, maybe even Nazis and Confederates.
In a similar Democrat-enabling interview last week, CNN&#8217;s Wolf Blitzer brought on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to explain how he has banned large gatherings in his city but exempted the police-bashing protests.
The mayor said staying at home is best. &#8220;But we understand that this moment in history, people are talking about the need for historic changes,&#8221; he said. He touted his prank painting of &#8220;Black Lives Matter&#8221; in front of Trump Tower: &#8220;(T)his is a historic moment of change. We have to respect that but also say to people the kinds of gatherings we&#8217;re used to, the parades, the fairs, we just can&#8217;t have that while we&#8217;re focusing on health right now.&#8221;
We&#8217;re focusing on health right now &#8230; unless you&#8217;re lining up with Historic Moments of Change. Someone — certainly not a journalist — might suggest the life of Christ was a very Historic Moment of Change worth celebrating.
Blitzer didn&#8217;t ask about the double standard because CNN has never been the Church News Network. He didn&#8217;t ask de Blasio about proclaiming that the &#8220;devout religious person&#8221; has less of a right to assemble than someone &#8220;grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism.&#8221;
In short, our media elites don&#8217;t care when religious believers of all colors and creeds are demoted to second-class citizens in a dizzying display of &#8220;affirmative discrimination.&#8221; Go complain about it to your God, they might say. This is a call to action, even that mysterious action called prayer.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Protest

GRAHAM: Leftist Protests More Sacred Than Church Services

Black Lives Matter

church

Coronavirus

COVID-19

protests

The July 6 Washington Post carried a typically colorful headline on top of the Style section. &#8220;A binder full of bombast: Kayleigh McEnany plays her boss and his base with derisive news briefing walk-offs.&#8221;
Media reporter Paul Farhi wrote McEnany&#8217;s &#8220;would-be smackdowns seemed so orchestrated&#8221; they only lacked some kind of musical flourish, like the opening witticisms that lead into the theme song on the crime drama &#8220;CSI: Miami.&#8221;
McEnany flourished again later that day, noting: &#8220;I was asked probably 12 questions about the Confederate flag. This President is focused on action. I&#8217;m a little dismayed that I didn&#8217;t receive one question on the deaths that we got in this country this weekend.&#8221; She wasn&#8217;t asked &#8220;about New York City shootings doubling for the third straight week, and over the last seven days shooting skyrocket by 142%.&#8221; Reporters groaned and protested.
For analysis of this tactic, Farhi turned to Ryan Lizza, the chief Washington correspondent of Politico. Lizza said these mic drops create delight for Trump and &#8220;the universe of Trump-friendly websites&#8221; who turn these commentaries into clips &#8220;for the MAGA-sphere.&#8221; That&#8217;s true. McEnany&#8217;s commentaries are great clickbait for people who want to see arrogant reporters get a dose of their own medicine.
But is Lizza really an objective observer? He then claimed: &#8220;We used to have this quaint idea that the press secretary wasn&#8217;t just a mouthpiece for the president, that half of the job was serving the press and the public. &#8230; That model is gone now. Now it&#8217;s almost pure theater, and (she&#8217;s serving) the negative partisanship that drives all else.&#8221;
Lizza isn&#8217;t being honest, because he represents &#8220;pure theater&#8221; and &#8220;negative partisanship&#8221; from the other side of the exchange. On May 26, he asked McEnany this beanball question repeatedly: &#8220;We&#8217;re about to cross the 100,000 dead American milestone &#8230; on Election Day, what does the White House view the number of dead Americans where you can say that you successfully defeated this pandemic? Is there a number?&#8221;
Recently, Lizza asked her facetiously, &#8220;Does President Trump believe that it was a good thing that the South lost the Civil War?&#8221;
Lizza&#8217;s live-in girlfriend, Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine, beat him to the sleazy punch when she asked Trump on April 27, &#8220;If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?&#8221;
This kind of question is performance art. It&#8217;s a look-at-me spectacle, a Jim Acosta bump and grind. There&#8217;s nothing &#8220;quaint&#8221; about it.
Farhi closed out this article with the expertise of Jennifer Mercieca, described merely as &#8220;an associate professor at Texas A&amp;M who specializes in rhetoric and public affairs.&#8221; McEnany&#8217;s &#8220;leave-taking behavior&#8221; points to &#8220;how adversarial the relationship between the press secretary and the press is at present,&#8221; she says. &#8220;The abrupt ending signals a lack of respect for the press, especially after she has berated their reporting.&#8221;
The Post didn&#8217;t note that Mercieca has a brand-new book about Trump called &#8220;Demagogue for President.&#8221; Its dust cover promises she will show, as one review reads, &#8220;how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America&#8217;s authoritarian PT Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.&#8221;
This would seem to signal a lack of respect for the president — or the ringmaster/dictator, in her overactive imagination. This book sounds like quite a &#8220;binder full of bombast.&#8221; But The Washington Post is pretending that political bombast is a one-way street &#8230; like no one ever reads its front page.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Kayleigh McEnany

GRAHAM: The Press Secretary Puts Down Bombastic Reporters

Washington Post

Levar Stoney, the black Democratic mayor of Richmond, Virginia, made the executive decision to remove a statue of Gen. Thomas &#8220;Stonewall&#8221; Jackson on Monument Avenue to &#8220;expedite the healing process for the city.&#8221; This demonstrated how cities with liberal majorities can take down statues in an orderly fashion without vandalizing them or pulling them down. Or it demonstrates how Democratic mayors respond to pressure from the self-appointed statue-removal squad.
The left is interested in taking down all kinds of statues, which raises an obvious question: What about the statues the left has put up? No one&#8217;s ripping those down.
In 2017, Peter Dreier at BillMoyers.com wrote a piece headlined &#8220;Where Are All the Monuments to the Progressive Americans?&#8221; He complained most of our country&#8217;s statues celebrate military, political and business heroes. &#8220;Shouldn&#8217;t we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country?&#8221; he asked.
Then he listed a few examples of the left&#8217;s heroes who have statues.
Exhibit A: &#8220;This statue of the pioneering and fearless birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, with a gag over her mouth, stands in Old South Meeting House in Boston. There are no schools named for the controversial socialist and feminist.&#8221;
Honk if you find it bizarre to describe Sanger, a racist and eugenicist, as your avatar of &#8220;humane and inclusive&#8221; policies. Her creation Planned Parenthood is a leading destroyer of black lives before they start. But when black men and women cooperate in abortions, you can&#8217;t possibly be allowed to tell them those extinguished lives matter.
They were &#8230; inconvenient.
Pro-lifers will show you Sanger&#8217;s autobiography in which she discussed speaking before the women&#8217;s branch of the Ku Klux Klan: &#8220;I accepted an invitation to talk to the women&#8217;s branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. &#8230; In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not surprising that no one has vandalized the Sanger statue. No one has ripped it down and set it on fire. It stands undisturbed. It&#8217;s not on public property. The Old South Meeting House was a Puritan church. Conservatives can despair at the &#8220;evolution&#8221; of this once-Christian space, but not one has vandalized it.
Meanwhile, NPR reported the Boston Art Commission voted unanimously on June 30 to remove Boston&#8217;s copy of the Emancipation Memorial depicting a formerly enslaved man at the feet of Abraham Lincoln. That statue has stood in Boston&#8217;s Park Square since 1879. But, activists complained, it was a &#8220;white-created statue.&#8221;
&#8220;Boston artist Tory Bullock said the sculpture is a whitewashed portrayal that denigrates an entire group of people,&#8221; NPR wrote. &#8220;This is a frozen picture. This man is kneeling, he will never stand up,&#8221; Bullock said. &#8220;This image is problematic because it feeds into a narrative that black people need to be led and freed. &#8230; Why is our trauma so glorified?&#8221;
Sanger, the racist and eugenicist, remains, while Lincoln was removed. He&#8217;s apparently the enemy of the African American people. An image of emancipation is traumatic. The abortion of black babies is apparently therapeutic.
Leftists like Tory Bullock do not understand how people who gladly acknowledge that &#8220;black lives matter&#8221; would consider the left&#8217;s moral posturing to be based more on ideology than reality. Those on the left speak angrily and endlessly of violated &#8220;black bodies,&#8221; but — to borrow a phrase from George Orwell — they imply some black bodies are more equal than others.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Margaret Sanger

GRAHAM: Lincoln Statues Must Go. Margaret Sanger Stays?

Abraham Lincoln

statues

Radicalism in America&#8217;s largest cities seems impervious to reason. Consider this headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: &#8220;Despite a wave of violence, Minneapolis &#8216;defund police&#8217; effort continues: An influential bloc of City Council members is pressing ahead with plans to dismantle the department as a monthlong eruption of gunfire sent tremors through neighborhoods.&#8221;
Reporter Liz Navratil explained that a majority of the Minneapolis City Council and like-minded community activists have used terms such as &#8220;defund,&#8221; &#8220;dismantle&#8221; and &#8220;abolish&#8221; in different ways. There&#8217;s some semantic tap-dancing. But they&#8217;re serious. They&#8217;re working to rewrite the city charter and dismantle a &#8220;minimum size requirement&#8221; for the police department. They talk about a police-free future.
A protester named Maisah Outlaw insisted: &#8220;This isn&#8217;t the first time an institution that is rooted in racism has been abolished. It&#8217;s not impossible.&#8221; She claimed, &#8220;We don&#8217;t need to scare people and beat people into submission.&#8221; Who&#8217;s going to be scared and beaten after the police go away?
The radicals behind this movement don&#8217;t just tweet about abolishing the police. They also talk about abolishing prisons. If violence is the problem, how is emptying prisons the solution? What next? Abolish the courts? These activists seem to think only police officers commit the kind of violence worth protesting. Prosecuting violent crimes like burglary, rape and murder is apparently racist. Conversation about Black-on-Black crime is treated like a distraction employed by racists.
One has to wonder if this is really the kind of stance people will support at reelection time. But it seems the pendulum only swings further to the left. Democrats have gotten reelected for decades on end to run big American cities. Many mayors and police chiefs are minorities. If &#8220;systemic racism&#8221; is rampant in America, how does that explain the systemic progressivism that keeps failing?
In the meantime, people who commit crimes are acting. With at least 113 people injured or killed in shootings since George Floyd&#8217;s death on May 25, some locals are &#8220;asking urgent new questions&#8221; about the potential effects of defunding the police, the Star Tribune reports. Do these elected officials fail to imagine what could happen if you were to &#8220;dismantle&#8221; the police force? The consequences of their utopian naivete?
Steven Belton, president and CEO of the Urban League Twin Cities, told the Star Tribune he believes all this Defund the Police advocacy &#8220;has emboldened criminals and sparked a new wave of violence.&#8221;
But city council member Steve Fletcher claimed they often don&#8217;t need armed officers, saying, &#8220;It&#8217;s so much more common that we&#8217;re showing up (and) the person has already left who has committed the crime.&#8221; So, should police officers show up at crime scenes unarmed, assuming the crook fled the scene? That seems to be the suggestion &#8230; that is if the cops have jobs in the coming years.
The radical experiment is coming. Cities will send social workers instead of police officers to deal with domestic violence complaints and drug overdoses. Will unarmed social workers be harmed in these volatile situations? Will they wish they had an armed cop backing them up?
Can liberal big-city newspapers be trusted to report on the aftermath of an overreaction? Or will they be too torn by inner newsroom turmoil over racial politics to paint an accurate picture for their community? Given their business model erodes, it&#8217;s not like they can afford to get this wrong.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

“Defund the Police” sign

GRAHAM: Abolish The Cops. Abolish The Prisons. What Next?

Defund The Police

Leftism

Minneapolis

One of the cultural shocks following the death of George Floyd under a policeman&#8217;s knee is the vandalism and destruction of statues across America. Usually, these statues are posted on public land by public officials with public assent &#8230; even if that came many years ago.
It&#8217;s not undemocratic to advocate for statues of men now considered unworthy to be removed from public spaces. You may argue there are &#8220;too many dead white men&#8221; in parks. But it&#8217;s blatantly undemocratic to vandalize them, behead them or pull them down. These are provocative acts with great potential for mounting revenge, disorder and countervandalism.
It&#8217;s amazing that the left can say mere words are violence, or that &#8220;silence is violence,&#8221; and not think it&#8217;s violent to tear down a statue.
No historic figure is safe from the anti-statue mobs. The Oregonian reported, &#8220;protesters tore down a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States who also owned over 600 slaves during his lifetime, outside his namesake high school in North Portland.&#8221;
Notice how journalists choose the word &#8220;protesters&#8221; to describe the perpetrators.
Some &#8220;protesters&#8221; look uneducated or nihilistic. A statue of abolitionist Matthias Baldwin, which stands outside Philadelphia City Hall, was defaced with spray paint. The word &#8220;colonizer&#8221; was strangely painted underneath. Apparently, any dead white male in a long coat must be racist.
In Boston, a monument to black soldiers who fought for the Union and against slavery during the Civil War was vandalized. The granite backside was covered with phrases including &#8220;Black Lives Matter,&#8221; &#8220;No Justice, No Peace&#8221; and &#8220;Police are Pigs.&#8221;
Richmond, Virginia — whose Democratic mayor sits under the state&#8217;s Democratic governor — is a hot spot for this vandalism virus. The New York Times reported, &#8220;Protesters toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, in Richmond &#8230; as demonstrators across the country continued to target symbols of white supremacy after the death of George Floyd.&#8221;
&#8220;A statue of Christopher Columbus was torn down and tossed into a lake in a Richmond city park where protesters had gathered for a demonstration in support of Indigenous peoples,&#8221; The Times added.
&#8220;Vandalism&#8221; was not the word of choice: &#8220;Statues of the Confederate generals J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, all of which stand on the city&#8217;s Monument Avenue, were marked.&#8221; Marked?
The Times called all this &#8220;a national reckoning over racist imagery and emblems.&#8221;
Then, as I predicted, someone vandalized the statue Richmond statue of Arthur Ashe, the black pro tennis star of the 1960s and 1970s. The New York Times said the statue was &#8220;vandalized,&#8221; not &#8220;marked.&#8221; It was not called a &#8220;reckoning.&#8221; Someone sprayed &#8220;WLM&#8221; (&#8220;White Lives Matter&#8221;) on the pedestal. The man who vandalized was not a &#8220;protester,&#8221; just a &#8220;man&#8221; who was quoted as saying, &#8220;You guys tagged my statue so I am tagging your statue.&#8221; Stupid tit and tat.
Ashe&#8217;s nephew David Harris Jr. told The Times: &#8220;People are outraged that people choose to vandalize a statue that represents peace, prosperity, inclusion, education, and the life and true fabric of the country: children. &#8230; there are folks out there that don&#8217;t believe in being inclusive.&#8221;
The Times fails to see the bitter irony in the assumption that &#8220;inclusion&#8221; is associated with the side that rips statues down without any care for who is not consulted, or which democratic norms are undermined. The left and its allies in the press are favoring disorder and vandalism &#8230; if it&#8217;s on &#8220;the right side of history.&#8221;
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

GRAHAM: The Anti-Statue Mobs Undermine Democratic Norms

George Floyd

Liberals are beginning to swagger around as if the 2020 election is already over. Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post exclaimed that President Donald Trump&#8217;s reelection campaign is &#8220;beginning to look like the Titanic.&#8221; Joe Biden should be preparing his inauguration remarks.
One reason for this arrogance is the absolutely punishing media coverage of Trump. The coronavirus pandemic did what some might have thought was impossible: made Trump coverage even more negative. Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that from March 4 (when Joe Biden had basically wrapped up the Democratic nomination) through May 31, Trump coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts was 94% negative. In May, it was 99.5% negative, an all-time low.
There were 474 evaluative comments about President Trump during this period, and 445 were negative. By contrast, there were only 85 evaluations of Biden, and 51 were negative (61%). They were nine times more negative about Trump.
This sounds a lot like the warp and woof of the 2016 campaign coverage, during which Trump drew the lion&#8217;s share of media attention and it was overwhelmingly negative, while Hillary Clinton seemed like an afterthought. Even in the last three months of the campaign, Trump was evaluated four times as much as Clinton.
The Democrats thought that made her a shoo-in. It didn&#8217;t turn out that way.
Here&#8217;s the problem for them. Anyone who has spent time with these networks knows they have a throbbing, swelling urge to destroy Trump politically. They can&#8217;t possibly be considered &#8220;referees&#8221; of presidential campaigns. One reason they&#8217;ve been so angry about the fate of &#8220;democracy&#8221; is they can&#8217;t stand it when voters ignore their incessant advice.
Jonah Goldberg recently wrote a column in which he argued Trump must think his voters are idiots since he proclaims he is running against the media instead of Biden. Obviously, the media aren&#8217;t on the ballot. But Biden&#8217;s attacks on the president cannot possibly match the media&#8217;s 24/7 aggression and firepower. They are not some irrelevant bystanders, especially now that Biden is campaigning from a cold computer screen.
Their protective coverage of Lovable Grandpa Joe is just as transparent. Noyes reported that ABC, CBS and NBC could barely muster three minutes of airtime on how Biden told black voters, &#8220;If you have a problem figuring out whether you&#8217;re for me or Trump, then you ain&#8217;t black.&#8221; NBC gave it a few seconds. ABC and CBS both rushed to &#8220;balance&#8221; the story with negative Trump news. CBS showed Biden was leading among black voters, 90% to 3%.
When it broke that Biden, in his last days as vice president, joined a list of other Obama officials requesting the &#8220;unmasking&#8221; of an American who turned out to be incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — which led to a smear about the former Army major general being a Russian pawn — the story drew merely 62 seconds of coverage: 55 seconds on ABC, 7 seconds on CBS and none on NBC. Voters who rely on these cynics for &#8220;news&#8221; wouldn&#8217;t even understand the Big Picture: that Team Obama improperly spied on the Trump campaign and was still trying to ruin Trump&#8217;s presidency during the transition.
Biden&#8217;s TV interviews are littered with please-trash-Trump questions, such as this beaut from MSNBC&#8217;s Brian Williams: &#8220;What is President Trump&#8217;s level of culpability — what&#8217;s his level of responsibility, say, toward the illness and fatalities we&#8217;re witnessing every few minutes these days?&#8221;
This sums up the tone of the latest evening news: How many Americans has Trump killed? They hope their nightly onslaughts demoralize Trump voters and energize Biden backers. But to many Americans, this is not journalism. It&#8217;s badly disguised campaign advertising.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Trump

GRAHAM: The Media’s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump

Media

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was at the red-hot center of the Robert Mueller probe into the phantom menace of Donald Trump&#8217;s collusion with the Russians. He testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 3.
You may not know that happened. ABC, CBS and NBC ignored it that night. PBS gave the story 55 seconds. NPR gave it 4 minutes, but those minutes sounded bizarre.
Anchor Mary Louise Kelly said: &#8220;May I start with an observation? Does this seem a little out of left field? With everything going on in the country right now, senators are focused today on the Russia investigation?&#8221;
Reporter Philip Ewing replied, &#8220;The short answer for that is, politics.&#8221;
The ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts devoted 2,202 minutes of coverage to the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory from Jan. 21, 2017, to Feb. 10, 2019. When the Senate Intelligence Committee announced on Feb. 12, 2019, that there was no collusion? There was zero coverage on ABC, CBS and NBC.
The short answer for that? Politics.
These networks, alongside the &#8220;prestige&#8221; print press, CNN and MSNBC, obsessed about Russian-collusion claims 24/7 for more than two years. It was never &#8220;out of left field.&#8221; It was the fiercely beating heart of the &#8220;news&#8221; product. The media repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of President Trump&#8217;s election and even welcomed bald-faced lies about Trump being a Russian agent. &#8220;Bombshell&#8221; after &#8220;bombshell&#8221; led to claims that collusion was going to end Trump&#8217;s presidency early. Now the papers bury the story on the inside pages.
Under questioning from senators, Rosenstein claimed he was not well-informed at all about everything the FBI — under his direct supervision — was doing to railroad Team Trump. Sen. Ted Cruz asked him if he knew that the primary source behind the Steele dossier disavowed it as rumors and hearsay. He said no. Did he know the Steele dossier was funded through the Democratic National Committee? No. But that partisan pile of hearsay was used repeatedly to authorize spying on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Cruz claimed what the Obama-Biden team did to undermine the Trump campaign, the Trump transition team and the Trump administration made Watergate pale by comparison. This would explain why the partisan networks skipped over this. They have labored to ensure that Trump — just like George W. Bush before him — was designated as the &#8220;worse than Watergate&#8221; president.
When Sen. Lindsey Graham asked if Rosenstein would agree in retrospect that, by August 2017, there was ultimately &#8220;no there there&#8221; to support the &#8220;concept that the campaign was colluding with the Russians,&#8221; Rosenstein responded, &#8220;I agree with that general statement.&#8221; But no one in that department, and no one in the press, backed down and stopped pushing a false collusion narrative.
The crowning audacity after the Rosenstein hearing came from MSNBC star Rachel Maddow, the Collusion Queen and Duchess of the Dossier. Without uttering the words &#8220;dossier&#8221; or &#8220;Rosenstein,&#8221; she complained that 53 new subpoenas would be issued to investigate the origins of this get-Trump conspiracy. With a megaton of chutzpah, she lamented this is designed to &#8220;create an air of criminality around Vice President Biden and the whole Obama administration in time for the election in November.&#8221;
A politicized &#8220;air of criminality&#8221; still wafts over the Trump administration, thanks to the &#8220;objective&#8221; media. But they offer no apologies, no retractions, no admissions of fault on the overall Russia mess. Their drumbeat of collusion &#8220;news&#8221; turned out to be &#8230; &#8220;fake news.&#8221;
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Rod Rosenstein

GRAHAM: When Russiagate Conveniently Vanishes

Obama Administration

Russia

On May 27, the American coronavirus death toll rose to six figures: 100,000 lives lost. That&#8217;s a very sad number, made sadder when we ponder that the virus prevents loved ones from saying goodbye in person and makes any funeral an extremely small event.
America&#8217;s largest national newspapers have all made dramatic front pages out of the number. The New York Times came first on Sunday, filling its entire front page and three more pages with names of the victims. USA Today followed on Wednesday with an entire front page in black and white and photos of the dead. The Washington Post waited until we reached the horrible number but still printed some stories on the front page.
In The Post, Marc Fisher brought the usual emotional language to the milestone. It &#8220;slipped by like so many other days in this dark spring, one more spin of the Earth, one more headline in a numbing cascade of grim news.&#8221; It&#8217;s hardly slipping by. They&#8217;ve made sure of that.
CNN promoted each and every one of these performative pages, which strongly enhanced the notion that this isn&#8217;t just a number. It is a political strategy. Each of these newspapers and CNN haven&#8217;t just reported on President Donald Trump; they&#8217;ve cast him as a dangerous man who should have been removed from office long before he had a chance to campaign for reelection.
It&#8217;s the same strategy callously projected by Politico writer (and CNN analyst) Ryan Lizza, who asked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany: &#8220;We&#8217;re about to cross the 100,000 dead American milestone. &#8230; on Election Day, what does the White House view as the number of dead Americans where you can say that you successfully defeated this pandemic? Is there a number?&#8221;
He didn&#8217;t ask just once. He kept repeating it. The implied message: The White House should be too embarrassed to ever claim victory, to ever claim that it did something right; that the situation could have been worse; and that it listened to the experts and took action.
You can&#8217;t merely grieve for the 100,000 in a vague way. This has to be trotted out as talking points, as Public Rationale No. 1 for removing Trump from office in November.
Lizza&#8217;s reporter girlfriend, New York Magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi, tried this tactic first, in a more baldly political way. A month ago, she asked Trump, &#8220;If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?&#8221;
CNN loves this line of attack questioning from this Sonny and Cher of smears. In April, Brian Stelter interviewed Nuzzi and Lizza as they sat in front of their fireplace. Stelter, referring to Nuzzi&#8217;s question to Trump, merely asked her, &#8220;Why did you think it was important to ask?&#8221; Apparently, it&#8217;s important to always imply to the public that Trump&#8217;s incompetence killed tens of thousands of people. (Rep. Adam Schiff was even more blunt, suggesting a successful impeachment effort would have saved many lives.)
Lizza&#8217;s response to Stelter looks even phonier now than it did then. He complained that right-wingers think these questions are &#8220;all somehow showboating, or not real journalism&#8221; and added with a straight face, &#8220;that&#8217;s just wrong and has never been the case since I&#8217;ve been covering the White House.&#8221; That&#8217;s a lie. He then added to that lie with further showboating.
We can all lament this death toll, but some are clearly beating their breasts in the most opportunistic way imaginable. Doing so doesn&#8217;t honor the victims. It merely exploits them.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Candle

GRAHAM: Showboating With 100,000 Dead

President Donald Trump has tweeted feverishly about &#8220;Obamagate,&#8221; which is loosely defined as everything the Obama-Biden team did using their executive branch powers to ruin Trump&#8217;s candidacy (and then presidency). The Trump-loathing press has responded with an unusual tactic. The self-appointed guardians of democracy who have auditioned themselves as America&#8217;s great explainers are playing dumb.
Yahoo News hosted a virtual town hall with Joe Biden on May 19. Dylan Stableford reported: &#8220;Biden was also asked about &#8230; the so-called Obamagate conspiracy, which revolves around a vague allegation that the former president illegally tried to sabotage the Trump campaign, or was involved in an effort to entrap Trump&#8217;s adviser Michael Flynn into lying to the FBI. Trump has referred to the invented scandal numerous times in recent weeks, although when a reporter asked him to specify what it was about he declined.&#8221;
Liberals call the Obama scandals &#8220;invented,&#8221; but the invention here is the entire Russian-collusion narrative. Newly released documents show Obama aides screamed &#8220;collusion&#8221; on cable TV but admitted to Congress they had no evidence. No wonder journalists who energetically pushed a false narrative are playing dumb now.
Biden said of Trump: &#8220;This is his pattern: diversion, diversion, diversion, diversion, diversion! Don&#8217;t speak to whatever the issues before us are.&#8221; Biden and his media enablers want the dominant story to be Trump&#8217;s allegedly horrible coronavirus response. Don&#8217;t look into the origins of the Russia probe.
These ersatz historians who love comparing every Republican scandal to Watergate can&#8217;t seem to grasp with their brains how Obama might have been getting intelligence on former national security adviser Michael Flynn&#8217;s contact with the Russians during the Trump transition, and supervising FBI attempts to entrap Flynn. This effort didn&#8217;t sound &#8220;vague&#8221; when it was discovered that FBI &#8220;professionals&#8221; said bluntly that they went to the White House &#8220;to get him to lie&#8221; so they could &#8220;prosecute him or get him fired.&#8221;
The May 15 episode of &#8220;Washington Week&#8221; on PBS displayed a cavalcade of confusion. CBS News White House reporter Weijia Jiang, who&#8217;s attempting to rival Jim Acosta in needling the president with gotcha questions, complained: &#8220;(E)ven the president himself was not able to offer clarity about what crime was committed. I mean he&#8217;s talking about people should go to jail. He has coined yet another phrase, Obamagate, to talk about this. And he hasn&#8217;t talked about what he&#8217;s talking about, and that doesn&#8217;t matter sometimes.&#8221;
Associated Press White House reporter Jonathan Lemire made it sound like the Obama years are back again, since he couldn&#8217;t find an Obama scandal anywhere. &#8220;There&#8217;s no real sense of a scandal here among most observers,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Most observers&#8221; can be defined as the press pool that voted overwhelmingly for Obama — twice.
&#8220;Obamagate &#8230; it&#8217;s a nickname for a scandal that doesn&#8217;t seem to have a there there,&#8221; he said. &#8220;He hasn&#8217;t elaborated on what it&#8217;s about.&#8221;
Then &#8220;Washington Week&#8221; host Robert Costa asked Abby Phillip of CNN how the Biden campaign is responding to these Obamagate messages. Phillip said the campaign has studied what went wrong with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and been &#8220;very aggressive&#8221; in undermining Trump&#8217;s attempts to &#8220;rebrand&#8221; all the Trump investigations as an Obama-Biden scandal. &#8220;So they&#8217;re really trying to put pressure on media organizations to not cover this incredulously and to really take a skeptical look at all of this,&#8221; she said.
Programs like these suggest that Team Biden either is incredibly effective at pressuring reporters to be scandal deniers or never had to pressure them in the first place.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Barack Obama

GRAHAM: Brainy Reporters Play Dumb On ‘Obamagate’

Obamagate

The 2020 Associated Press Stylebook is being published soon, and the AP is not humble about what it represents. &#8220;The style of The Associated Press is the gold standard for news writing,&#8221; they boast, and the book offers a sturdy path to the AP&#8217;s &#8220;famous&#8221; brand of &#8220;clarity and professionalism.&#8221;
In recent years, conservatives have seen the AP&#8217;s Stylebook squad tilt perilously to the left, forgoing clarity for politically correct muddiness. In 2017, they scrapped the &#8220;gender binary,&#8221; since male and female divisions are just too insensitive. &#8220;Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex or gender, according to leading medical organizations, so avoid references to both, either or opposite sexes or genders as a way to encompass all people.&#8221;
On May 8, they took their torches to the term &#8220;mistress&#8221; as hopelessly outdated. &#8220;We now say not to use the archaic and sexist term &#8216;mistress&#8217; for a woman in a long-term sexual relationship with, and financially supported by, a man who is married to someone else. Instead, use an alternative like companion or lover on first reference. Provide details later.”
Notice the AP&#8217;s linguistic leap to banish any troublesome moral aspersions on a woman for cheating with a married man. It&#8217;s &#8220;archaic&#8221; to lament breaking God&#8217;s commandments, but then, the AP would probably scold you for using your archaic Bible to describe God as a &#8220;he.&#8221;
Their assumption about sexism is that the cheating husband doesn&#8217;t get such a discouraging term. They forget terms like &#8220;womanizer,&#8221; or in the case of financial support, a &#8220;kept man.&#8221; But there are plenty of descriptors without gender — paramour, philanderer, cheater or just sinner.
In the real world, much more callous or loaded words are used, from &#8220;trollop&#8221; to &#8220;side piece.&#8221; You can&#8217;t say &#8220;whore&#8221; or &#8220;prostitute&#8221; because the left prefers the term &#8220;sex worker.&#8221; It&#8217;s as desperate as calling a smoker a &#8220;cigarette enthusiast.&#8221;
Using the word &#8220;lover&#8221; is too positive. Cheating men and women are certainly not demonstrating &#8220;love&#8221; to the spouses and children betrayed. &#8220;Love&#8221; should mean something more grounded and permanent than two hours in the back seat of a car or a motel room or under the president&#8217;s desk.
Some reporters prefer the term &#8220;romantically involved,&#8221; which connotes &#8220;romance&#8221; in betraying your marital vows. Adultery quite often leads to divorce and family breakdown, which means this kind of furtive &#8220;love&#8221; drags down the entire society.
A weasel word like &#8220;companion&#8221; is the opposite of the AP&#8217;s supposed clarity. Many &#8220;companions&#8221; aren&#8217;t sexual at all. One facetious Facebook commenter told the AP: &#8220;This is awesome. I&#8217;d never introduce my mistress to my wife, but I feel like she might be more accepting if I call her my companion.&#8221;
These guardians of style often reach for euphemisms when they feel like terms are dehumanizing. So, they joined the politically correct lobbies in demanding an end to the term &#8220;illegal immigrant,&#8221; and they lecture, &#8220;Avoid the dehumanizing collective noun &#8216;the homeless,&#8217; instead using constructions like homeless people, people without housing or people without homes.&#8221;
You can place them squarely on the left when they don&#8217;t mind socially distancing from unborn babies with the dehumanizing term &#8220;fetus,&#8221; which they teach is &#8220;preferred in many cases, including almost all scientific and medical uses,&#8221; not to mention the legislative uses.
The Stylebook cops may describe themselves as seeking &#8220;nonjudgmental&#8221; terms, but declaring things &#8220;archaic&#8221; or &#8220;sexist&#8221; is quite obviously judgmental. They seek to overthrow a dated orthodoxy only to impose a new one, which is just as rigid. They might interject that it&#8217;s &#8220;rigidly compassionate.&#8221; But &#8220;clarity&#8221; in writing is nowhere to be found.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Journalists.

GRAHAM: AP Says Ditch The ‘Mistress’

Associated Press

If the &#8220;first rough draft of history&#8221; in the news media sounds dubious, the second draft made by Hollywood will almost certainly be worse. I&#8217;m not talking about documentaries, which can be judged as journalism. I&#8217;m talking about movies and TV shows, which will inevitably be pressed to dramatize things so they are evermore loosely &#8220;based on real events.&#8221;
CBS has been preparing a miniseries based on former FBI Director James Comey&#8217;s memoir, pompously titled &#8220;A Higher Loyalty.&#8221; In the memoir, he lectured, &#8220;Ethical leaders choose a higher loyalty to those core values over their own personal gain.&#8221; But the personal gain was sweet for Comey.
First came the high-roller book deal with 850,000 copies, heavily promoted by all the Democrat-repeating networks. In Comey&#8217;s case, that included an hourlong prime-time ABC &#8220;news&#8221; special during which he was interviewed by that nonpartisan George Stephanopoulos. The book sold like hotcakes to Trump haters. Add some more millions for his optioning the book to Hollywood for &#8220;entertainment.&#8221;
Production was slated to begin last November, but there&#8217;s no word if it was anywhere near done before the coronavirus pandemic kicked in. Apparently, CBS Television Studios hasn&#8217;t even decided where this Heroic Comey miniseries will land, either on Showtime or the CBS All Access streaming service, where it would be an easy match with the network&#8217;s Trump-trashing drama &#8220;The Good Fight.&#8221;
Comey will be played by Trump-hating actor Jeff Daniels, who recently made the New York media swoon by starring as heroic lawyer Atticus Finch in &#8220;To Kill a Mockingbird&#8221; on Broadway. The miniseries director, Billy Ray, said Daniels was picked because he had &#8220;instant integrity, loads of warmth, intelligence, complexity and gravitas.&#8221; That&#8217;s obviously how they expect to portray Jim Comey: as another heroic lawman on the actor&#8217;s resume.
Ray promised he would make a &#8220;fair, responsible and comprehensively documented account of real-life events,&#8221; CBS said in a press release. But current events are intruding on Comey&#8217;s memoir and his picture of a heroic and nonpartisan FBI battling a president with no respect for the rule of law. For example, new documents have surfaced that purport to show the FBI agents who investigated President Donald Trump&#8217;s former national security adviser Michael Flynn sought &#8220;to get him to lie&#8221; so they could &#8220;prosecute him or get him fired.&#8221; Does that sound nonpartisan?
Comey bragged to MSNBC&#8217;s Nicolle Wallace in 2018 that he flouted the usual protocols for interviewing a top White House official. Usually, the White House counsel is contacted and an interview is carefully arranged. In this case, Comey just sent in his agents, the ones scheming to &#8220;prosecute him or get him fired.&#8221; Former Comey aide Josh Campbell admitted in his own memoir that Comey said, &#8220;We just decided, you know, screw it.&#8221;
Flynn didn&#8217;t see the attack coming. He said sure and did the FBI interview — without a lawyer present. He walked right into shark-infested waters and lied to the sharks, turning his life upside down.
Attorney General William Barr has decided to vacate Flynn&#8217;s conviction, finding the adventurous FBI interview was &#8220;untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI&#8217;s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn.&#8221;
I think we can guess the CBS miniseries will glide right over the latest developments to keep its focus on Heroic Comey, no matter how much that narrative is collapsing. It&#8217;s likely the series will be the latest in a line of conservative-smearing historical dramas aired by CBS/Showtime, from the Clarence Thomas-whipping &#8220;Strange Justice&#8221; to &#8220;The Reagans.&#8221;
But CBS — the Dan Rather network — lectures the rest of us to stop spreading disinformation.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

James Comey

GRAHAM: Hollywood’s Heroic Comey Story Collapses

Hollywood

Michael Flynn

The Hollywood Reporter recently broke a scoop about the latest Netflix documentary from the Obamas, designed to offer us an oasis of joy as we suffer through the coronavirus pandemic. It&#8217;s called &#8220;Becoming,&#8221; and it will be available worldwide on May 6. As the title suggests, it promotes Michelle Obama&#8217;s memoir of the same name, which has sold more than 10 million copies. So let&#8217;s get this straight. The Obamas were awarded a book deal worth an estimated $65 million for their memoirs, hers and then his. They also struck an estimated $50 million production deal with Netflix. (We don&#8217;t have actual numbers. Could someone in the media ask for a tax return?)
With this self-aggrandizing documentary, their second deal is being used to accentuate the profits of their first. The buckraking here is intense. President Donald Trump surely admires their self-promotional moxie. The Obamas quickly became superrich. Vanity Fair celebrated these &#8220;Obamoguls&#8221; and hailed Michelle Obama for her &#8220;saintly popularity.&#8221; This so-called saint doesn&#8217;t spurn the finer things. Last August, TMZ reported the Obamas were buying a $15 million mansion on the coast of Martha&#8217;s Vineyard to match their $8 million Washington, D.C., mansion. Non-Fox network coverage? Zero. In December, they actually bought said Martha&#8217;s Vineyard mansion for $11.75 million. Non-Fox network coverage? Again, zero. There would be no denting haloes by asking how much they&#8217;re giving to charity. The documentary celebrates Michelle Obama&#8217;s &#8220;Becoming&#8221; book tour events at stadium that charged Obama superfans $300 or more a ticket, often with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey along for the ride.
Media outlets repeated Obama&#8217;s self-puffery without rebuttal. &#8220;Those months I spent traveling — meeting and connecting with people in cities across the globe — drove home the idea that what we have in common is deep and real and can&#8217;t be messed with,&#8221; she said in a statement. She augmented her new status as a self-help guru with a workbook of sorts: &#8220;Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice,&#8221; complete with &#8220;an intimate and inspiring introduction by the former First Lady and more than 150 inspiring questions and quotes to help you discover — and rediscover — your story.&#8221;
Not everyone famous is praised for self-help books for women. The current president&#8217;s daughter Ivanka Trump wrote one in 2017, and The New York Times was brutal. &#8220;It reads more like the scrambled Tumblr feed of a demented 12-year-old who just checked out a copy of Bartlett&#8217;s Familiar Quotations from the library,&#8221; it wrote.
There are never Republican critics of Obama in the &#8220;news&#8221; these days. In a Washington Post story on the documentary, writer Sonia Rao quoted Anita McBride, chief of staff to former first lady Laura Bush, who said Obama was &#8220;a reluctant first lady&#8221; but then formed lasting public connections through her &#8220;extraordinary use of media and pop culture and television.&#8221;
Is that Michelle&#8217;s gift to the media? No, it&#8217;s the media&#8217;s gift to Michelle. The infatuated titans of &#8220;news&#8221; and entertainment media appear to have granted her every &#8220;extraordinary&#8221; wish in building this &#8220;billion-dollar brand.&#8221;
The cheers are always presumed to be unanimous. Dissent from this party line is ignored. And no one asks about the profits. For the Obamas, greed is cast as just another inspiring voyage of self-discovery.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Michelle Obama

GRAHAM: Michelle Obama, Saintly Buckraker?

Netflix

On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day — something of an ecological feast day — journalistic, philanthropic and religious leaders echoed the spirit of the original celebration: The human race is a cancer on the planet. In the sternly reinforced quiet of stay-at-home orders, this Team Earth reveled in how the world is such a better, cleaner, calmer place when most humans can&#8217;t commute or commit tourism.
CBS reporter John Blackstone found a silver lining in the pandemic, saying, &#8220;From goats in a deserted town in Wales to lions lounging on a road in South Africa, nature seems to be saying, &#8216;We can get along fine without you.'&#8221; Michael Brune of the Sierra Club added, &#8220;We all need nature a lot more than nature needs us.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not hard to imagine that ecologists would root for the coronavirus pandemic to reduce the tide of human ruination of nature. Perhaps the coronavirus hasn&#8217;t been brutal enough for them. In his 1968 bestseller, &#8220;The Population Bomb,&#8221; Paul Ehrlich channeled the approaching spirit of Earth Day as he openly discussed how India should have been denied food aid because the population reproduced too irresponsibly.
In The New York Times in 1971, Catholic writer L. Brent Bozell Jr. imagined a starving boy in Bombay bedeviling the global intelligentsia, writing: &#8220;There is a greater supply of him than there is demand. He disturbs the ecological balance. He is socially inconvenient. The demographic mind eyes him and observes it would be better had his father been sterilized, or his mother aborted him — or, better still, had he never been conceived.&#8221;
In reality, human expertise prevented Ehrlich&#8217;s apocalyptic vision of &#8220;massive die-backs&#8221; from famine in India, and everywhere. The ecological gospel has shifted emphasis from overpopulation to climate change, but the left continues to harp on the suicidal idiocy of the undereducated majority of the human race. Today, those supposed rubes are pressing to open up the lockdown.
It&#8217;s a little surprising that the negative spirit of Earth Day is channeled by Pope Francis, who has been citing an old Spanish saying (as translated to English): &#8220;God always forgives. We humans sometimes forgive, and sometimes not. The Earth never forgives.&#8221; This is a strange bucket of logic. Nature recovers from oil spills and forest fires, with or without human help. The pope suggested the coronavirus could be &#8220;the Earth&#8217;s response to our maltreatment,&#8221; as if the virus were a supreme being.
He sounds like Michael Moore, who&#8217;s insisting, &#8220;Mother Nature has put us in its time-out room right now — literally, not just figuratively.&#8221;
Catholics around the world are taught the pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals. But this pope&#8217;s ecological reasoning can be questioned. Stewardship of God&#8217;s creation is absolutely imperative for the faithful but not at the expense of God&#8217;s most precious creation, made in His own image to share in His eternal home.
In his 2010 World Day of Peace message, Pope Benedict XVI struck a more charitable tone regarding humanity&#8217;s place on the planet. Faced with the debate over pollution, deforestation and climate change, he said mankind should renew and strengthen &#8220;that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying.&#8221;
Many of us feel impatient to return to the energetic swirl of commuting and vacationing and shopping and watching sports and getting decent haircuts — just as soon as it doesn&#8217;t sound ominous. In the meantime, we should worry about people who celebrate a silver lining of pristine air and water due to the coronavirus &#8220;die-back.&#8221;
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Earth protesters

GRAHAM: Earth Day Dunking On Humans

Climate Change

Earth Day

Environmentalism

Pope Francis

The biggest joke in former President Barack Obama&#8217;s endorsement video for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was his warning about what Biden is facing. &#8220;(I)t won&#8217;t be easy,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The other side has a massive war chest. The other side has a propaganda network with little regard for the truth.&#8221;
Obama has almost the entire news media eating out of his hand, and he still whines about Fox News, that irksome &#8220;propaganda network.&#8221; The left complains whenever it can&#8217;t corner every media market and squelch any uprising of conservative dissent. It&#8217;s &#8220;propaganda&#8221; and &#8220;disinformation&#8221; when you disagree with the left&#8217;s wonderfully compassionate worldview.
Then there are the comedians, who are even more urgently on the verge of complete groupthink. I opened up my morning email of video clips from Grabien and was just amazed at the venom of commentary from the late-night shows on April 15. Let&#8217;s start with President Donald Trump&#8217;s decision to withhold World Health Organization funding for a few months to probe what went wrong with the eruption of the coronavirus from China.
The comedians fell all over themselves competing for the best metaphors to describe Trump as a flaming-hot moron who will harm us all. Who would win the gold medal for hottest burn?
On ABC, there&#8217;s Jimmy Kimmel, who said: &#8220;Stopping funding to an organization that handles pandemics in the middle of a pandemic is like slashing your own tires because you&#8217;re mad you woke up late for work. So far, he&#8217;s blamed this on Obama, the governors, the media, the WHO. Has he blamed it on the Mexicans yet?&#8221;
On CBS, Stephen Colbert offered his own entry: &#8220;It&#8217;s like when your house is engulfed in flames: The first thing you do is burn down the fire department. The U.S. is the WHO&#8217;s biggest donor, so Trump is talking about taking away around $553 million. He hasn&#8217;t done anything this hostile to world health since introducing the burger table&#8221; (translation: the fast food feast at the White House for the Clemson football team).
On Comedy Central, &#8220;Daily Show&#8221; host Trevor Noah joked about Uber when talking about Trump&#8217;s maligning the &#8220;integral&#8221; WHO: &#8220;It&#8217;s the same reason you don&#8217;t give your Uber driver one star during the ride. You do that (expletive) after you are safe at home, not while you&#8217;re doing 90 on the freeway. &#8216;One star? One star? I will show you one star, motherf——-!'&#8221;
The late-night comedians can even trash CNN &#8230; from the left. NBC late-night host Seth Meyers lectured the cable newsers for their live coverage of Trump&#8217;s coronavirus press briefings. &#8220;(I)t doesn&#8217;t make it better when you give it a negative chyron, like CNN did on Monday with &#8216;Angry Trump Turns Briefing Into Propaganda Session,'&#8221; he said. &#8220;You know what else turned that into a propaganda session? Pointing your camera at it. Before you showed up it was just &#8216;Crazy Lawn Man Does His Thing.&#8217; You can&#8217;t air a propaganda session and criticize it.&#8221;
For &#8220;balance,&#8221; we could spy on CBS late-night host James Corden, who interviewed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her kitchen two nights earlier. Now, she would be held accountable, right? Wrong. For 15 minutes, Corden asked softball questions such as this: &#8220;Why is it, do you think, the president is choosing to ignore scientists and science and talk about reopening the country, not shut the country down soon enough? Why do you think?&#8221;
Then Corden gushed all over Pelosi when she showed him her expensive freezer loaded with chocolate ice cream. &#8220;I have always felt a connection with you, and now I understand why,&#8221; he said.
To CBS, she&#8217;s a very sweet and creamy Woman of the People. But look over there at Fox. That network is just full of one-sided, partisan propaganda.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Jimmy Kimmel

GRAHAM: The Late-Night Comedians Rage At Trump

China

World Health Organization

The liberal Columbia Journalism Review has published a lengthy special report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism on the values and practices of online conservative news sites. Three professors, Anthony Nadler, A.J. Bauer and Magda Konieczna, interviewed 22 journalists at 14 websites, and their overall picture of the conservative media is straightforward. Among their findings about conservative journalists are the following:
— They espouse journalistic ideals such as accuracy and fairness, if not objectivity.
— They express an interest in engaging the broader public, not just conservatives.
— They&#8217;re dedicated to reporting stories they felt were &#8220;consistently underreported&#8221; by liberal darlings and institutions.
— Many feel &#8220;conservative journalism as a whole is treated unfairly by the mainstream press.&#8221;
Some feel conservative media is &#8220;marginalizing conservative perspectives critical of Trump&#8217;s honesty and character.&#8221; That&#8217;s not surprising, given that the trio of professors interviewed &#8220;conservatives&#8221; at The Washington Post and at The Bulwark, a red-hot never-Trump outpost. They reported, &#8220;Asked what makes for an ideal conservative journalist, Bulwark senior editor Jim Swift joked &#8230; &#8216;the ideal conservative reporter or journalist usually just leaves conservative media as soon as they possibly can,'&#8221; since it&#8217;s not lucrative.
Surely, one could be both a conservative journalist and a critic of Trump&#8217;s &#8220;honesty and character.&#8221; It&#8217;s just that sites like The Bulwark are harshly critical of most conservatives and end up sounding much more like Vox than Fox. They sent freelancer Molly Jong-Fast to the Conservative Political Action Conference. The &#8220;highlight of the hellscape,&#8221; she proclaimed, &#8220;was seeing Laura Ingraham attempt a comedy set. Laura said that Democrats want post-birth abortions and made a number of extremely unfunny jokes about Jim Acosta.&#8221;
Feeling CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta&#8217;s pain is not a &#8220;conservative media&#8221; norm.
This was the saddest finding of the study: &#8220;Many participants said they see few other conservative outlets as high-quality news sources. They described their own publication&#8217;s commitment to accuracy, thoroughness, or fairly representing fact as an exception within the field of conservative news.&#8221;
The point was demonstrated by Ethan Barton, managing editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation, who bragged, &#8220;Within conservative media, I would say our big thing is that we&#8217;re far more in-depth and measured — and I know this is obviously my biased opinion — and reliable than other conservative outlets.&#8221;
That&#8217;s not going to win friends and influence people for the Daily Caller. This is not what you find in major media. You don&#8217;t often see The Washington Post saying to interviewers, &#8220;The New York Times is far less reliable and deep-thinking than we are.&#8221;
These professors should be welcomed for finding the conservative media to be worth academic attention. But they seem to be dismissing the overwhelming bias that provides so much energy and loyalty to conservative outlets. Nadler and Bauer have seriously argued, &#8220;there has been little social-scientific corroboration of liberal media bias.&#8221; That&#8217;s like arguing social science has failed since 1996 to establish that Fox News leans to the right.
Like many liberals, the three professors assume media outlets from &#8220;television networks such as NBC and CNN to prestige publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post and digital upstarts like Vox or BuzzFeed&#8221; can be identified as &#8220;mainstream,&#8221; &#8220;nonpartisan&#8221; and &#8220;general interest.&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t matter how valiantly these &#8220;nonpartisan&#8221; outlets identify themselves as being the ones to vanquish Team Trump in the defense of grand concepts like endangered truth and dying democracy.
&#8220;Nonpartisan&#8221; journalism for the &#8220;general interest&#8221; sounds great, but that&#8217;s not what any of these overtly partisan and liberal outlets provide. Our media are divided between conservative and liberal, right and left, not conservative and &#8220;nonpartisan general interest.&#8221; That ship has sailed, and it sunk.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Journalists

GRAHAM: Academe Assesses The Conservative Media

academia

Conservative media

Journalism

On March 25, Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer for Joe Biden, made a disturbing accusation about her old boss. She claimed in a podcast episode with Katie Halper of Rolling Stone that then-Sen. Biden sexually assaulted her in a secluded area of the Capitol in 1993, pushing her against a wall, trying to kiss her and penetrating her with his fingers.
Like many accusers, Reade cannot prove this happened. The Biden campaign quickly denied it. &#8220;Women have a right to tell their story, and reporters have an obligation to rigorously vet those claims,&#8221; deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement. &#8220;We encourage them to do so, because these accusations are false.&#8221;
But are those obligated reporters rigorously vetting these claims? Are reporters pounding the pavement and incessantly droning on their cellphones over this? There&#8217;s no sign of any of that.
The networks haven&#8217;t said a single word about them &#8230; even as Biden did an hourlong town hall on CNN, interviews on NBC and MSNBC and then more interviews on CNN and MSNBC. So in the week after the allegations emerged, Biden was asked 55 questions but not one about this accusation. But NBC&#8217;s Chuck Todd asked Biden whether President Donald Trump has &#8220;blood on his hands&#8221; for his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The networks clearly believe there should be a presumption of innocence, and that the mere launch of these charges can unfairly sully an image. The fact that this accusation emerged from a sketchy source like Rolling Stone underlines that. Journalists appear to be very sensitive &#8230; when the target is a Democrat. How can they fail to see the double standard?
This was not the standard for Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018. The broadcast networks offered more than 300 minutes to several accusers who told wild stories of Kavanaugh&#8217;s sexual assaults during his teenage years that could not be proved in any way. Christine Blasey Ford couldn&#8217;t manage to offer a time or a place of her alleged assault — less information than Reade offered. But she instantly became a profile in courage, cemented as a &#8220;historic figure.&#8221;
During the hearings, the accusers were warmly embraced (metaphorically) by one Joe Biden. &#8220;For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you&#8217;ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she&#8217;s talking about is real,&#8221; he said.
There&#8217;s nothing on the Biden story on NPR — the proud purveyor of Anita Hill&#8217;s unproven accusations against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — and nothing on The New York Times. Two years ago, The Times somehow found space for a story that claimed Kavanaugh threw ice cubes at a man in a bar scuffle while attending Yale.
There&#8217;s no evidence of investigative journalism from The Washington Post, which first published Ford&#8217;s incredibly vague accusations. As Kavanaugh was being aggressively prosecuted and accusations arose about the Post cooperating with a Democratic plot to derail Kavanaugh, executive editor Martin Baron protested saying, &#8220;The conspiracy theories are pure nonsense.&#8221; As the late Wes Pruden used to say, there wasn&#8217;t a conspiracy, just a consensus.
In 2016, The Post was first to jump on the 2005 &#8220;Access Hollywood&#8221; tape in which Donald Trump assaulted no one but bragged about how he could assault women because he was a TV star. The paper waited about five hours before publishing the story. It seemed like the entire political elite — Republican and Democratic — was demanding Trump drop out of the presidential race immediately.
Where are all these people now that Biden is in the dock? Absent. Apathetic. Callously indifferent. Out to lunch, never to return? #MeToo dies in darkness.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

GRAHAM: The Kavanaugh Roasters Hide Biden’s Accuser

Brett Kavanaugh

Sexual Assault

The extra-large pack of journalists who equate liberalism and professionalism in their work cannot stand that Fox News exists. They believe everything elected Republicans do should be &#8220;fact-checked&#8221; and routinely punished. For Democrats, the elite media offer damage control; for Republicans, only damage.
The onset of the novel coronavirus is simply another occasion for the usual routine. The liberal media are prosecuting Fox for supposedly shoving Americans off a coronavirus cliff with misinformation. They&#8217;re also equating misinformation with the argument that the pandemic gave them a new rationale to cripple President Donald Trump politically.
The latter is not misinformation. It&#8217;s rock-solid, bank-on-it information.
Yes, the president and the conservative media were suspicious of all the worst-case scenarios and expressed skepticism about the threat. Many of us were initially reluctant to be dragged into a massive government intervention. Then Italy happened.
Ben Smith, the brand-new media columnist for The New York Times, is openly prosecuting Fox for deaths caused by the coronavirus. Smith asked Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Public Health Institute, whether he &#8220;believes people will die because of Fox&#8217;s coverage.&#8221; Jha said yes. &#8220;Some commentators in the right-wing media spread a very specific type of misinformation that I think has been very harmful,&#8221; he said.
Then Smith noted that Fox has been compared to a virus, quoting Bill Kristol, who was on Fox until 2012. &#8220;People act like Fox is a virus — beyond our control,&#8221; said Kristol. &#8220;There are people who run it, who have responsibility for it, and they could be held accountable.&#8221;
Kristol is a gentleman compared to Eric Boehlert, a leftist regular on the badly named program &#8220;AM Joy.&#8221; He shamelessly claimed: &#8220;Fox News has been getting people killed for years. I mean just look at their crusade against affordable health care, their crusade against expanding Medicaid. This is not unusual for them. &#8230; (T)hey are a cancer on this country.&#8221; No one is &#8220;fact-checking&#8221; that statement.
So where do we go from here? Trump suggested that perhaps the country could ease up on the social distancing restrictions by Easter Sunday. That caused another wave of rage aimed at Trump and his Fox &#8220;feedback loop.&#8221;
But the media recognize, even at The New York Times, the reality that federal and state governments have to balance the nation&#8217;s overall health with the nation&#8217;s economy. They don&#8217;t trust Trump. They trust Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose coronavirus briefings are hailed by The Times as &#8220;communal therapy sessions.&#8221; Whenever Cuomo thinks we can relax, the media will declare relaxation is the responsible, nonpartisan solution.
Cuomo has said: &#8220;I take total responsibility for shutting off the economy in terms of essential workers. But, we also have to start to plan the pivot back to economic functionality, right? You can&#8217;t stop the economy forever. So we have to start to think about, &#8216;Does everyone stay out of work?'&#8221;
On The Times podcast, &#8220;The Daily,&#8221; reporter Maggie Haberman discussed at length how Fox News is warping Trump&#8217;s response to the coronavirus. She admitted, &#8220;in fairness to him, Gov. Cuomo has openly voiced the same moral dilemma that he is wrestling with.&#8221; But Haberman implied that Cuomo&#8217;s moral stand is superior: &#8220;It&#8217;s just that Gov. Cuomo came down on the other side of it, which was that there is no cost that can be put on human life.&#8221;
Liberal scribes love the noble-sounding ideological extreme &#8220;no cost can be put on human life.&#8221; It&#8217;s like they&#8217;ve never observed the way a socialist health care system mercilessly rations care and decides some lives aren&#8217;t worth extending. But they&#8217;ll just keep lamenting that the country&#8217;s well of information is poisoned by the news channel they pretend is the only ideologically polarized one.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Fox News

GRAHAM: Railing Against The Fox Virus?

Andrew Cuomo

Every once in a while, the liberal journalists at PolitiFact grant President Donald Trump a rare rating of &#8220;Mostly True.&#8221; Most recently, they verified a Trump tweet about Joe Biden: &#8220;During the 2009 swine flu outbreak, Biden made reckless comments unsupported by science &amp; the experts. The Obama Admin had to clean up his mess &amp; apologize for his ineptitude.&#8221;
They explained that on April 30, 2009, Biden was interviewed by then-NBC host Matt Lauer on the &#8220;Today&#8221; show. Lauer asked, &#8220;If a member of your family came to you and said, &#8216;Look, I want to go on a commercial airliner to Mexico and back,&#8217; within the next week, would you think it&#8217;s a good idea?&#8221;
&#8220;It&#8217;s not that it&#8217;s going to Mexico. It&#8217;s you&#8217;re in a confined aircraft,&#8221; Biden said. &#8220;When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.&#8221; He added that he wouldn&#8217;t advise taking the subway, either: &#8220;If you&#8217;re out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes, that&#8217;s one thing; if you&#8217;re in a closed aircraft or closed container or closed car or closed classroom, it&#8217;s a different thing.&#8221;
One reason PolitiFact wrote this up is that it rated Biden&#8217;s claim &#8220;Pants on Fire&#8221; back in 2009. In an airplane, the experts said, a sneeze might travel a row or two but not throughout the whole plane.
The @TrumpWarRoom Twitter account found a 2009 video of then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs trying to spin what Biden &#8220;meant to say&#8221; — that if you&#8217;re feeling ill, don&#8217;t get on a plane. Next you hear Jake Tapper, then with ABC, shooting back saying, &#8220;With all due respect,&#8221; Gibbs&#8217; statement wasn&#8217;t &#8220;even remotely close&#8221; to what Biden said.
Here&#8217;s the important part: The networks energetically circled the &#8220;news&#8221; wagons to protect Biden. They helped &#8220;clean up his mess,&#8221; as Trump said.
Then-CBS anchor Katie Couric brought a doctor on &#8220;CBS Evening News&#8221; and said, &#8220;the vice president created a bit of a brouhaha &#8230; but that&#8217;s not terrible advice in certain situations, is it?&#8221; In 2008, Brent Baker at NewsBusters noted how Couric had earlier been so protective of Biden that she didn&#8217;t correct him during an interview when he said Franklin Roosevelt &#8220;got on television&#8221; when the stock market crashed.
On ABC&#8217;s evening newscast, then-anchor Charles Gibson ran the &#8220;Today&#8221; show clip of Biden and asked then-ABC medical editor Dr. Tim Johnson, &#8220;Is he overreacting?&#8221; Johnson admitted Biden was off-base, but then spun it into a positive: &#8220;In an ironic way, the reaction — the information that has come out in reaction — has been very informative.&#8221;
Fox&#8217;s Chris Wallace wasn&#8217;t so sanguine in a New York talk radio interview with Steve Malzberg. &#8220;This just is very reckless, and, and, it just makes you wonder, &#8216;What&#8217;s the matter with this guy?'&#8221; he said. &#8220;I&#8217;m able to get on and off the air without saying — I hope, most times — without saying something stupid. He doesn&#8217;t seem to be able to do that.&#8221;
It&#8217;s worth remembering that the media&#8217;s coverage of infectious diseases resembles their coverage of every other potentially controversial topic. Verifiable facts are often secondary, and political spin dominates. Liberal media outlets find it boring to merely organize and recite facts. It&#8217;s in their nature to nurture and protect the people they locate on &#8220;the right side of history.&#8221;
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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Tim Graham

GRAHAM: Will Democracy Seem Lost In The Mail?

GRAHAM: The Real Collusion Scandal Of The 2016 Campaign

GRAHAM: Leftist Protests More Sacred Than Church Services

GRAHAM: The Press Secretary Puts Down Bombastic Reporters

GRAHAM: Lincoln Statues Must Go. Margaret Sanger Stays?

GRAHAM: Abolish The Cops. Abolish The Prisons. What Next?

GRAHAM: The Anti-Statue Mobs Undermine Democratic Norms

GRAHAM: The Media’s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump

GRAHAM: When Russiagate Conveniently Vanishes

GRAHAM: Showboating With 100,000 Dead

GRAHAM: Brainy Reporters Play Dumb On ‘Obamagate’

GRAHAM: AP Says Ditch The ‘Mistress’

GRAHAM: Hollywood’s Heroic Comey Story Collapses

GRAHAM: Michelle Obama, Saintly Buckraker?

GRAHAM: Earth Day Dunking On Humans

GRAHAM: The Late-Night Comedians Rage At Trump

GRAHAM: Academe Assesses The Conservative Media

GRAHAM: The Kavanaugh Roasters Hide Biden’s Accuser

GRAHAM: Railing Against The Fox Virus?

BOZELL & GRAHAM: The Cleanup Crew For Biden’s Flu Flubs

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GRAHAM: Will Democracy Seem Lost In The Mail?

GRAHAM: The Real Collusion Scandal Of The 2016 Campaign

GRAHAM: Leftist Protests More Sacred Than Church Services

GRAHAM: The Press Secretary Puts Down Bombastic Reporters

GRAHAM: Lincoln Statues Must Go. Margaret Sanger Stays?

GRAHAM: Abolish The Cops. Abolish The Prisons. What Next?

GRAHAM: The Anti-Statue Mobs Undermine Democratic Norms

GRAHAM: The Media’s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump

GRAHAM: When Russiagate Conveniently Vanishes

GRAHAM: Showboating With 100,000 Dead

GRAHAM: Brainy Reporters Play Dumb On ‘Obamagate’

GRAHAM: AP Says Ditch The ‘Mistress’

GRAHAM: Hollywood’s Heroic Comey Story Collapses

GRAHAM: Michelle Obama, Saintly Buckraker?

GRAHAM: Earth Day Dunking On Humans

GRAHAM: The Late-Night Comedians Rage At Trump

GRAHAM: Academe Assesses The Conservative Media

GRAHAM: The Kavanaugh Roasters Hide Biden’s Accuser

GRAHAM: Railing Against The Fox Virus?

BOZELL & GRAHAM: The Cleanup Crew For Biden’s Flu Flubs

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