Well, isn’t this interesting.
One Chris Quinn, the Editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has taken the time to pen a “Letter from the Editor” to the paper’s readers. The topic: the paper’s coverage of former President Donald Trump.
The letter is designed to set the apparent critics of the paper’s Trump coverage straight. Coverage that, it seems, strikes Plain Dealer Trump-supporting readers as -- shocking, I know -- biased against the former president.
The letter, found here, is a classic of thinking from inside the liberal media bubble. Lacking any self-awareness and, in the name of “truth” making utterly untrue comments.
Let’s take a look.
Says Quinn: “The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.” Then he quickly spins out…untruth.
Examples? Quinn:
The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.
This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
Journalists who are in no way objective still proclaim "This is not subjective." Journalists who sound exactly like Democratic strategists proclaim Trump uniquely undermined faith in our elections...after they spent most of Trump's presidency implying daily that he stole the election in a conspiracy with the Russians. That was a "yearslong campaign" to convince us Hillary Clinton's bridge didn't collapse.
There's the usual hype that this was the worst threat since the Civil War, and these people have claimed with a straight fact that January 6 was much more serious than September 11. That's flabbergasting.
There have been problems with American elections long pre-dating Trump. Trump was not needed to undermine faith in our elections.
In 2022, for example, CNN ran this headline on my own state of Pennsylvania:
Ex-Democratic congressman sentenced to prison in yearslong Pennsylvania election fraud scheme
CNN begins its reporting this way:
CNN — Expelled former Democratic congressman Michael “Ozzie” Myers has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for federal election fraud dating back to 2014, the Justice Department said Tuesday, and was immediately taken into custody.
Myers, 79, pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to deprive voters of civil rights, bribery, obstruction of justice, falsification of voting records, and conspiring to illegally vote in a federal election as part of scams to stuff ballot boxes for certain Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania elections between 2014 and 2018, the DOJ said in a news release.
Prosecutors said some of the candidates were running to be judges and had hired Myers, who would use portions of “consulting fees” from his clients to pay others to interfere with election results.”
And the source for this story was not what Quinn refers to as "news sources of no credibility.” The source was the United States Department of Justice, as seen here in a DOJ press release. And the headline from the DOJ release:
Former U.S. Congressman and Philadelphia Political Operative Sentenced to 30 Months in Prison for Election Fraud
In addition to the problem cited above involving Pennsylvania elections in the five elections between 2014 and 2018, the New York Times ran this headline on its front page all the way back in 1994:
Vote-Fraud Ruling Shifts Pennsylvania Senate
The Times began its story by reporting:
Saying Philadelphia's election system had collapsed under ‘a massive scheme’ by Democrats to steal a State Senate election in November, a Federal judge today took the rare step of invalidating the vote and ordered the seat filled by the Republican candidate.
In making such a sweeping move, the judge, Clarence C. Newcomer of Federal District Court here, did for the Republicans what the election had not: enable them to regain control of the State Senate, which they lost two years ago.
Judge Newcomer ruled that the Democratic campaign of William G. Stinson had stolen the election from Bruce S. Marks in North Philadelphia's Second Senatorial District through an elaborate fraud in which hundreds of residents were encouraged to vote by absentee ballot even though they had no legal reason -- like a physical disability or a scheduled trip outside the city -- to do so.
Talk about “undermining faith in our elections”! Note well. This story about a “massive scheme” that resulted in a stolen election was reported in 1994 - a full 21 years before Donald Trump ever ran for president.
Like his many colleagues in the liberal media, Quinn takes Trump's failure to concede defeat and exaggerates it into “an insurrection” on January 6th. Here’s a fact Quinn chooses to ignore. This is subjective. This is energetic spin, not a matter of law. In the charges brought by Biden DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith, not one charges Trump - or anybody else - with insurrection, and insurrection is in fact a chargeable crime. It hasn’t happened.
So for Quinn to tell Plain Dealer readers that Trump “sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power” isn't true in a legal sense -- or he would have been charged by Special Counsel Jack Smith for doing so.
Completely ignored by Quinn is that President Joe Biden is the very first president in American history whose administration has gone out of its way to prosecute his political opponent to keep himself in power. Biden is behaving in the fashion of a third world banana Republic dictator in his treatment of his political opposition -- and Trump is the problem?
Amusingly and illustrating a complete lack of self-awareness, Quinn says that “ the media landscape has been corrupted by partisans.” Seriously?
A media landscape “corrupted by partisans”? Like at MSNBC? Or maybe, closer to home, by partisans like Chris Quinn and the Cleveland Plain Dealer?
The real fact here is that the Editor of the Plain Dealer has in fact made it plain that his highly subjective - and decidedly false - “true north” portrayal of Trump will be running the paper’s coverage of the 2024 election.
It doesn’t get much more fake news than that.
Note to readers of the Plain Dealer? Look elsewhere for true north coverage in 2024.
