Our colleague Jeffrey Lord penned a new piece for The American Spectator on "The Hyperpartisan Washington Post." He was mocking Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan as she denounced the conservative media for pushing mostly lies and conspiracy theories instead of real information. The online headline for Sullivan was “Pro-Trump media sets the agenda with lies. Here’s how traditional media can take it back.”
To Sullivan, there is the “hyperpartisan” right-wing media, and on the other side, there is the “traditional media.” As if the “traditional” media is not “hyperpartisan.” This is published in The Washington Post, the newspaper that pictured a mushroom cloud inside Trump’s head.
Sullivan went after Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, claiming Levin “may have started the evidence-free idea that President Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of now-President Trump.” This is an odd claim, since Levin’s original argument was based on “traditional” press outlets like The New York Times and the socialists at The Guardian in the UK. Lord wrote:
Levin did no such thing. What he did do, as detailed here, was make it vividly clear — using mainstream media stories including the Post and others — that in fact the Obama administration had been conducting surveillance of Trump and/or Trump campaign associates. That is a fact. Asked directly in a Fox interview whether Obama personally ordered the surveillance, Mark relied that he was not “Nostradamus” — but emphatically made it clear that the mainstream media reporting on surveillance of Trump had clearly cited information drawn from some sort of Obama administration surveillance known to the intelligence community.
Indeed the March 2, 2017 Post story specifically said: "The contacts were being examined as part of a wide-ranging U.S. counterintelligence investigation into possible communications between members of Mr. Trump’s campaign team and Russian operatives."
Democrats lament that Hillary Clinton's election was prevented by a clumsy government investigation of her private e-mail server in the last few weeks of the campaign, but the new narrative shows the government was also actively investigating Trump's campaign and its communications with Russian sources.
Was it somehow nonpartisan if Obama was overseeing a possible October Surprise that might parallel the conspiracy theory that Reagan was in league with the Iranians? That might have been a more damaging October Surprise than the Access Hollywood tape.
Sullivan also claimed Hannity spread the "outlandish" idea that the CIA hacked the DNC e-mails, gave them to WikiLeaks and framed Russia. Lord took a cudgel to that:
While Sullivan doesn’t breathe a word of it, look no further than this story from that far-right nut site known as CBS News. As seen here, the CBS headline is this: Michael Morell: CIA trove on WikiLeaks “an inside job”. The story says in part:
CBS News senior security contributor Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, said there are a lot of questions about how the WikiLeaks release occurred, calling it an inside job.
“Absolutely. This data is not shared outside CIA; it’s only inside CIA. It’s on CIA’s top secret network, which is not connected to any other network. So this has to be an inside job,” he told “CBS This Morning: Saturday.”
Sullivan is free to disagree with this story. But if she cares about truth and lies, she can't claim this is all originating in "hyperpartisan right-wing media outlets." Lord then played around with Sullivan's fevered phrasing and turned the attack back around on the liberal media:
To send a conspiracy theory on its vicious way around the world, you need to do more than just believe. You need help.
Luckily for those who wanted to elect Hillary Clinton, that help was available during the presidential campaign, and still is. It comes from a collection of old left-wing hyperpartisan media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times that are having a huge effect on politics.
Consider, for example, one outlandish idea from just the last few months: that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails, gave them to WikiLeaks and this resulted in Hillary Clinton losing the presidential election.
Lord also explores how energetically the Post has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. It all makes you shake your head as pseudo-conservative Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote for Tuesday's paper on how Trump and his supporters are "defining lunacy down," feverishly comparing America to Nazi Germany. Really, then?
They share the goal of defanging American intelligence services and having America accept a shrunken global role. Leaking from the CIA is the context in which Trump once asked, “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
Sullivan went to another supposedly "nonpartisan" or "traditional" source, the leftists at the Columbia Journalism Review, touting a "major study" claiming a new right-wing "media ecosystem" caused Trump's election.
“A right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyperpartisan perspective to the world,” the report concluded, after studying 1.25 million stories.”
At least in her column, Sullivan seemed to grasp the fact that she's also sitting in the middle of a "distinct and insulated system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a [Margaret calls it "traditional"] perspective to the world."
Conservatives don't trust liberal media because it's so intensely liberal, causing them to seek information from sources that don't seem to greet them as racist rubes who don't even seem to know the liberal media can most effectively tell them what is right for them.
