The latest Gallup poll confirms that the level of trust in the media has reached another new low. For Republicans, the percentage who hold a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the press has dropped precipitously to 14 percent, begging the question: Who are those 14 percent of Republicans comfortable with the non-stop jihad against them?
It’s no accident these numbers emerged while the liberal press slams the GOP nominee as too dangerous to be allowed to win. Public trust is on the line when moderators line up for the presidential debates. Will they be fair, or will they decide “history” is too important and pound on Trump before a national audience?
Some won’t. Already, Fox’s Chris Wallace drew liberal outrage by declaring “I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad. It's up to the other person to catch them on that.” Wallace said he sees his role as being like a referee in a heavyweight boxing match, where no one remembers the referee. But today’s liberal media is hounded from the left that being a mere referee is being an accessory to evil.
Matt Lauer was hounded for failing to call out Trump in an NBC “commander-in-chief forum” for lying about his support for the Iraq war – and daring to question Hillary about her e-mail scandal. The Left is poised to rip into any journalist who doesn’t tilt the playing field.
It’s been easily established over the last year that Donald Trump can lie or mangle facts without regret. But how has it not been just as established that the Clintons lie and mangle facts without regret? Our so-called “referees” of the facts deplore the one at every opportunity while tolerating, or ignoring, or even defending the other.
On September 19, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was the latest pundit citing the liberal site calling itself PolitiFact to suggest Hillary’s much more honest: in 53 percent of its Trump rulings, they found his utterances were “False” or “Pants On Fire” lies, compared to only 13 percent for Mrs. Clinton.
This happens because PolitiFact routinely fails to assign its “fact-checkers” when Team Clinton lies through its collective teeth. For example, try to find the ruling when the Clinton campaign said Hillary left a 9/11 event because she was simply “overheated.” That was a Pants on Fire moment. Similarly, they refused to rule on whether Hillary lied to Benghazi relatives about a video being responsible for the loss of their loved ones.
Then there are those “Pants on Fire” rulings for Trump. The latest one was Trump declaring Hillary has no child-care plan. Perhaps Dionne should talk to his fellow Post columnist Catherine Rampell. Three days before he cited PolitiFact as reliable, she wrote the Clinton campaign tweeted a “snarky retort” to Trump saying “It’s literally right here,” with a link. But Clinton had offered a gushy list of goals, with no plan to meet them.
Rampell announced: “But if you click that link, you’ll discover that Trump is....not wrong.”
Nevertheless, PolitiFact proclaimed “we found two headings on the issues page of Clinton’s website that seemed to address the question.” So headings that “seem to” address an issue are somehow a “plan”? How is this a “fact” that makes Trump a “Pants on Fire” liar?
Journalists will analyze the debates as soon as they’re finished to examine “the facts.” But they want Trump to be thumped for “lies” in real time – surely, so that Hillary can be proclaimed the “winner,” also in real time. They don’t want to be referees. They want to be fighters who defeat Trump.
