Beware when PBS brings on a "nonpartisan" expert on election integrity, and no one mentions Kamala Harris at all. On the September 3 PBS News Hour, deeply biased White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez brought on David Becker for a segment titled "How Trump has made election lies a key feature of his campaign." But this wasn't just about Trump denying he lost the election in 2020. Most of it was about "pre-denial," or how Trump would spin a loss in the 2024 election.
Becker is a CBS News contributor and co-authored an anti-Trump book with CBS reporter Major Garrett titled The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of “The Big Lie,” touted as an "overwhelming counterattack" on Trump's election denial. (They also feverishly imagined the outbreak of civil war in 2023.)
Barron-Lopez was most offended that "Trump and his allies have also claimed, without evidence, that noncitizens are voting in large numbers…What's the function of claiming that noncitizens are voting in massive numbers? Why do it?" Becker naturally agreed: "There isn't evidence. Even Trump's own allies in states like Georgia, Texas and other places have looked for large amounts of noncitizens registered or voting and they just can't find them. It's because they don't exist."
Becker claimed Trump is raising this Fake News so he can explain "to his sincerely disappointed supporters if he loses, and then perhaps incite anger and division and donations and even violence in the post-election period."
CBS recently aired a story trashing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) for investigating voter fraud and noncitizen voter registration. This suggests the "No Evidence" crowd doesn't like anyone looking for evidence.
Barron-Lopez then asked "What are the mechanisms, are there any for Donald Trump to overturn the 2024 election results?" Becker replied, "It's likely he's going to spread some of these lies about noncitizen voting, about mail voting not being secure, about voting machines being rigged, about dead Venezuelan dictators and bamboo ballots and Italian satellites. We should expect that."
But what if Trump wins narrowly and the Democrats become the election deniers again (like 2000, 2004, and 2016)? Does anyone think Becker will be summoned to denounce them? The "nonpartisan" guy who worked for the leftist group People for The American Way? As long as people are making predictions, it's safe to predict CBS and PBS will go along with whatever conspiracy theories Democrats prefer if Harris loses.
Brianna Lyman at The Federalist noted Becker appeared on CBS's Face The Nation last Sunday and smeared Trump and Elon Musk in with foreign dictatorships in spreading election disinformation:
“We’re seeing more election disinformation for sure. It’s coming from Donald Trump. It’s coming from Elon Musk. It’s coming from, we know, foreign adversaries like Russia, and Iran, and North Korea and China,” Becker said, claiming all the aforementioned parties were working to create doubt about election processes and outcomes.
“So when you see information on social media in particular, that triggers something within you, that seems to make you angry about the other side, all of us, as sophisticated media consumers, should pause and say, what is — maybe that anger is the product they’re trying to create. Maybe they’re getting paid, or they’re benefiting from creating that anger in us.”
Musk waded into the conversation, calling Becker “a liar through and through.”
“The very definition of disinformation,” Musk said in a post on X.
Becker didn’t explicitly clarify what so-called “misinformation” Musk has allegedly spread, though in the recent past Becker has criticized Musk for questioning whether our elections are secure from illegal immigrants voting.
