From the White House Correspondents Dinner to 60 Minutes, reporters spent the weekend claiming they're not an opposition party, they're just "independent" people who search for the "truth," doing "honest journalism." Fact check: False.
The White House Correspondents Association held their annual self-congratulatory dinner on Saturday night. WHCA president Eugene Daniels, a Politico reporter now moving to be an MSNBC host, claimed preposterously: “We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public’s trust. What we are not is the opposition. What we are not is the enemy of the people. And what we are not is the enemy of the state.” This blatant falsehood was followed by a standing ovation.
Everyone with eyes and ears can see “mainstream media” are the opposition to the Trump administration and Trump voters. They are not the enemy of the people, they are the enemy of the Trump people. They are not stewards of the public trust. They are water carriers for the Democratic Party. They often engage in messaging or advertising for the side they favor. They are often repeaters, not reporters.
What made it weirder was giving an award to Alex Thompson of Axios.com for his coverage of President Biden’s mental decline. This has to be seen as an acknowledgment that the White House press corps as a group were timid and deferential to the Democrats. Thompson said “we missed a lot of the story.” But most of us did not miss the decline. The liberal media remained in defiance of reality until their fellow Democrats saw him faceplant at a presidential debate. Then suddenly, they shifted along with the party line. That’s one of many reasons that most Americans no longer trust these people.
We heard a similarly preposterous speech from AP White House reporter Zeke Miller: "From the White House to the town of Whitehouse, Texas - it's a real place - Peoria to the Persian Gulf, we at AP remain committed as ever to accurate, independent, nonpartisan journalism, to carrying light the world over.”
If AP were independent and nonpartisan, they would be fighting with Trump and suing the White House. If AP were independent and nonpartisan, their leading female journalists wouldn’t be writing suckup softball books about Jill Biden, with all their FLOTUS favoritism. If AP were interested in accurate journalism, they wouldn’t push on all media outlets this flagrantly anti-factual propaganda: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women.”
No one is surprised when the 60 Minutes crew at CBS congratulates itself for being "independent" of the Trump White House. But the I-word sounds ridiculous when you think of 60 Minutes and Democrats. Scott Pelley gave a show-ending commentary about executive producer Bill Owens resigning because he didn't like Paramount's brass overseeing what they were putting together. "Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires."
They just have to claim that their decades of political campaigning against Republicans is “Honest Journalism” that never lost its "independence."
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