The media’s credibility woes are getting worse, but they’ve got company.
While one news outlet after another endures self-inflicted wounds, another liberal group suffers right along with them:
The Hollywood Resistance™.
Celebrities have never been more vocal, more politically active. From social media to the not-so-hallowed halls of Hate Night TV, stars are shoving their facts and opinions in our faces.
For the last two years, that means sharing any information which could take down President Donald Trump or his associates. And, it’s increasingly clear, wallowing in Fake News sans apology.
The latest example came when a gaggle of stars insisted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh should be impeached following new sexual assault accusations against him, courtesy of The New York Times.
It took all of 24 hours for the Times’ scoop to collapse like a building targeted for demolition.
Did the assembled stars apologize? No. In fact, “West Wing” alum Bradley Whitford doubled down … days after the story was exposed as false. Whitford called Justice Kavanaugh a “sexual assaulting cowardly rich kid” on Twitter.
A similar situation occurred earlier this year when a group of Christian teens from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky descended on the Nation’s Capital. A video clip of the teens encountering a Native American elder got twisted by the media into a baseless attack on the lads, one of whom wore a red MAGA hat.
That Hollywood Resistance rose up, again, to slam the kids in the very worst possible ways. Alyssa Milano, the far-left actress turned activist, cried, “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.”
Chris Evans of “Avengers” fame is trying to find a more bipartisan approach to his liberal activism of late. Yet Evans still hasn’t removed his Tweet unfairly excoriating the youngsters sent after the Fake News broke.
Pushing Fake News is nothing new for Hollywood, particularly on the late night front.
For two-plus years far-left hosts assumed President Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election and interfered with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the alleged crime.
They mocked Trump’s looming impeachment, joked about the Russia-Trump ties and assumed Mueller’s eventual report would bring the Trump era to a noisy end.
That push included the infamous “c*** hoslter” crack from Stephen Colbert on CBS’s “The Late Show.”
When the Mueller Report failed to link Trump to Russia, Team Late Night essentially shrugged. No apology, just more anti-Trump rhetoric disguised as comedy.
It’s hardly the only time the late nighters pushed an agenda over reality. The host of “Late Night with Seth Meyers” savaged Trump for crippling the Meals on Wheels program last year.
The only problem? It just wasn’t true.
Did Meyers apologize for the rant? Of course not. Celebrities rarely, if ever, apologize for sharing false information.
And how many stars have leveraged the serially debunked Charlottesville lie against the president? Probably too many to count. Director Spike Lee won an Oscar earlier this year for a film leaning into that lie. His “BlacKkKlansman” ended with a deceptively edited video removing the line from Trump’s Charlottesville speech where the president slammed Nazis in no uncertain terms.
Stars aren’t journalists. They haven’t undergone reporter training or learned the essential elements behind a story. It’s not their fault the mainstream media’s biases are getting worse, or that blockbuster stories routinely fall apart in a matter of hours.
If they want to be taken seriously, though, they need to follow up on breaking news and update their followers accordingly.
The Hollywood press, equally liberal and increasingly dishonest, won’t hold the stars accountable. The threat of legal consequences might do the trick. Just ask Kathy Griffin.
Spider-Man’s beloved Uncle Ben famously told him, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Like it or not, modern celebrities wield great power, from their massive social media flocks to the microphones perpetually thrust in their faces.
Their words, and tweets, have consequences. The more they deny that reality, the less reason Americans from either party will trust them.