On Capitol Hill, the first lesson learned was this: If you lie to someone, you are dead as a useful staffer.
A person can be political as all get out and bend data to suit their argument ― that is the very definition of politics in the first place. However, if you are proven to have lied or broken a promise made to seal a deal or compromise, you might as well pack your bags and leave Washington.
The major news media outlets in America might as well pack its bags because of all the lies they have manufactured and perpetuated since 2016. They may never recover the trust of the American public again.
Add in the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) on top of minimal trust in the media, and it will be next to impossible to trust anything anyone reads online again unless and until they are 10,000% assured of the integrity of the source.
American journalism has accomplished such a Herculean feat entirely on its own. A once-proud and (reasonably) honorable profession dedicated to ferreting out “truth” is today nothing more than a sounding board for often childish ad hominem attacks from propagandists ― mostly from the left.
It is as if Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf run all major media news outlets today. “The sky will fall if Trump is elected as a fascist dictator!” cries one commentator. (He is not) “Trump will order the military to round us all up and send us to gulags!” laments a panel on MSNBC. (He won’t)
A long time ago, America had only three main channels through which news was transmitted to the American people ― CBS, ABC and NBC. People came to trust news anchors such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Harry Reasoner. The news they delivered each evening came across as fair and reasonable, backed up by solid research and corroboration.
Back then, no serious journalist would ever dare to quote an “anonymous” source ― they either were named or not quoted at all. Two or more sources had to be fact-checked and verified before any story ran on the nightly news.
Bernard Shaw of CNN set the bar pretty high for nonpartisanship in journalism when he asked Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, an avowed opponent of the death penalty, the following question during a debate with then-VP George H.W. Bush 41: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
Shaw would never ask Kamala Harris a mushy softball question about what she liked to cook or what flavor ice cream she prefers ― unlike the fawning press from CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post and the aforementioned Big Three networks of 2024.
In the past decade, journalism has moved sharply away from reporting basic news and facts and become far more politically leftish in its orientation and reporting. They have become effectively the mouthpiece of the progressive Big State socialist left ― and they really don’t care what opponents say about it.
And then they wonder: “Why do so many people not listen to our dire warnings about Donald Trump being a fascist dictator?”
They said Russian collusion was behind Trump’s victory in 2016; They were wrong ― the whole story came out of Hillary Clinton’s camp the day after she lost. They said Hunter Biden’s laptop story was fake and another case of Russian or Chinese “disinformation.” They were proven wrong again ― everything on Hunter Biden’s laptop was put there by him and him alone.
Former five-time Emmy Award-winning CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson lists 162 deliberate errors on the part of the major news media when it comes to its reporting about Donald Trump in the last four years alone. God only knows how many false statements they have made about Republicans and conservatives in the past two decades.
Big news media moguls and anchors never admit they were wrong and ask for forgiveness from the American people. It is like they think they never lied in the first place.
God forbid Trump turns out to be a fascist dictator. (He is not ― dictators don’t wait until their second term to start killing people.)
Like Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf one too many times, the media will have squandered its credibility on nonsense.
If Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House, it may be partly due to the anger of voters toward the media. Its constant lying will be viewed by future historians as one of the craziest, least productive and dangerous abuses of the free press in American history.
