The Flabbergasting and Dangerous Dishonesty of the Press

Remember this line from the Washington Post a week before the 2020 Presidential election: “President Donald Trump’s ‘Warp Speed’ project helped deliver safe and effective coronavirus vaccines, saving countless lives”?

How’s that? You don’t remember it? Oh……wait………yes, maybe you’re onto something. It wasn’t the week before the election. It was last week, in a Post story about how anti-vax lunatics in the Republican Party are all but destroying its chances in next year’s election. The line in the Post a week before the 2020 election was this:

As President Trump entered the final stretch of the election season, he began making more than 50 false or misleading claims a day. It’s only gotten worse — so much so that the Fact Checker team cannot keep up.

As of Aug. 27, the tally in our database that tracks every errant claim by the president stood at 22,247 claims in 1,316 days.

The Post then did a helpful update:

UPDATE: The final count for the Trump claims database is 30,573. For more information, follow this link.

Yes, good that we could keep up by following the handy link.

If anyone has seen the Post’s tracking database for Joe Biden’s whoppers — “transient” inflation and our “orderly exit” from Afghanistan and all that — please put a note in the comments section.

Of course the big recent news about the press’s dishonesty came in the wake of the Durham report. Special Counsel Durham properly confined his discussion to the dishonesty, bias, double standards and willful ignorance, among other things, of the FBI and the Justice Department (wonderfully summarized here) — flaws that would be, and are, bad and dangerous enough standing on their own. But the obvious and at least equally alarming upshot was the dishonesty of the press for two full, giddy years of playing up the FBI/DOJ Russiagate hoax, a hoax cooked up in what was the Left’s functional equivalent of — how shall I say this? — election denial.

Now it wasn’t election denial in the sense in which that phrase has come to be understood, to wit, claiming that in an honest count, Trump beat Biden in November. It was denial in a more subtle and insidious sense: Strictly for political ends, and based on a fable spun by the Clinton campaign and its, it tied down and handicapped a duly elected administration for two years; intentionally and cleverly played to Trump’s worst instincts regardless of the obvious danger to the country of doing so; and, among other things, cost the country the services of an excellent and honest Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. It did this by effectively smearing Trump as an illegitimate President — not just narcissistic, ugly, and lacking a popular vote mandate, but a “Russian asset.”

It was election denial in the sense that it portrayed Trump’s narrow win, and thus his presidency itself, not as a authentic outcome of the American electoral process, but as the product of an enemy’s dirty tricks. In any meaningful sense, that is election denial roughly in the same league with the zingers Trump lets fly. And very likely more calculated.

Bad as that is, it’s not the worst of it. It revealed a development considerably more threatening in the long run, but one that has gone without comment so far as I’ve seen.

It used to the the case that the press was a watchdog on abuse of government power. Probably the most memorable instance of this for people of my generation was that very same Washington Post in its intense and often breathless coverage of Watergate. The coverage had its political slant to be sure, but in the end it performed perhaps the most valuable function the press in a democratic country can do: It exposed the corrupt and illicit use of government agencies — agencies with enormous power that we’re supposed to be able to trust. Agencies like the FBI. Agencies like the Justice Department.

The Russiagate hoax turned all that inside-out. Instead of exposing the FBI’s and DOJ’s political slanting, manipulation and outright lying (remember the FBI lawyer who altered a document he submitted to the FISA court?), the press was its co-conspirator, its catalyst and its bullhorn.

Where are the alarm bells? A skeptical, nosy, persistent — and independent — press is democracy’s first line of defense against an abusive government. But the press we have now has effectively become not the investigator but the arm of an abusive government. It does this probably less by what it says (although that too) than by what it omits. And the omissions are more insidious, since by definition they are the things you are kept from seeing.

Today’s story laden with faux angst about the debt ceiling is a good example. The Post, which has done more than its share of scaremongering about the terrible, awful, bone-chilling, really bad US default that it has known from the get-go isn’t going to happen, leads off with this: “Get ready for a debt-deal nail biter.”

The House is scheduled to vote today on the debt deal struck between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and it promises to be a tense day on Capitol Hill, with the date for a possible government default fast approaching.

While the measure is expected to pass on a bipartisan basis, McCarthy and his team are working furiously to whip as much Republican support as possible.

McCarthy cleared his first hurdle Tuesday night, when he was able to get the floor rule for the debt limit deal through the Rules Committee — a usually perfunctory bit of congressional process that grew tense because of the opposition of hard-right Republicans….

Now for McCarthy’s next challenge: Getting the full House to adopt the rule so the actual legislation can be brought up for a vote.

It won’t be easy.

It is usually up to the majority party to supply the votes to adopt a rule — even if a bill is bipartisan, the party out of power rarely votes for the rule.

Did you catch those last ten words? Even when the bill is bi-partisan, the party out of power rarely votes for the rule. Here’s the translation to supply the omitted parts: “Biden has backed the bill, and his Treasury Secretary has spent weeks spinning out the supposedly catastrophic consequences of not lifting the debt ceiling, but the Democrats, who consist of 49% of the membership of the House, are happy to sit on their hands and let it sink because they know that we, the Post, and the rest of the media, will blame the Republicans.”

This is the media we have now. “Democracy dies in darkness,” dontcha know.

And still that isn’t the worst of it. In all the scaremongering coverage of the supposed debt crisis, what’s the one thing the press barely mentions? Very good, class! The thing that doesn’t get mentioned is how we wound up with over 30 trillion dollars in debt to begin with, most of it accumulated in just the last dozen years (yes, the country borrowed less in the prior 220 years than it did in the last 12).

The reason it doesn’t get mentioned is that it might prompt some curious soul out there to ask the question we ought to be asking every day: Is the United States going to become the first country in history permanently to consume more than it produces and, if so, how exactly is that going to work?

A curious press might also want to ask that question. But we no longer have a curious press any more than we have an honest one.