OPINION:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement on Tuesday of an impeachment inquiry into allegations that President Biden committed public corruption with his involvement in his son Hunter’s sketchy business dealings has opened the Biden family to well-deserved scrutiny.
Perhaps more importantly, the investigation is already exposing a White House desperate to use its authority to manipulate the public conversation.
Republican investigators have produced evidence suggesting the Biden family has raked in millions that foreign entities poured into dozens of shell companies Hunter Biden established while his father was vice president. Initiating an impeachment inquiry, Mr. McCarthy said, is the “logical next step” in unraveling the Bidens’ fishy finances. More than 150 bank-generated suspicious activity reports constitute a maze of transactions obscuring their overseas origins.
It’s unsurprising that even before the speaker’s move, a CNN survey found 61% of Americans believe Mr. Biden was involved in his son’s dubious ventures in China and Ukraine. Only 38% disagree, and 1% reckon he was involved, but not in an illegal way.
The waning public support appears to have triggered the White House to retaliate against Republicans. Ian Sams, a special assistant to the president, crafted a letter Tuesday to major news organizations, urging them to turn the tables on the backers of the Biden investigation.
“It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies,” Mr. Sams wrote. Recipients of the letter reportedly included The New York Times, The Associated Press, Fox News and CNN.
The missive follows another foolish foray into media manipulation, in which administration officials pressured social media companies to censor speech on their platforms regarding such contentious issues as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. A federal appeals court ruled in July that these actions likely violated the Constitution’s First Amendment.
If the comparison is inexact, the intent of both schemes is the same: to strong-arm journalists into advocating the White House narrative and spiking competing views, regardless of the facts.
So many in the media have become comfortable with a role promoting a “Biden good, Trump bad” narrative that Mr. Sams might have wasted some perfectly good ink. MSNBC columnist Dean Obeidallah, for one, has called former President Donald Trump “the Bin Laden of the 1/6 MAGA terrorist attack,” and to save democracy, Mr. Trump “must die in jail.”
With an equal measure of delusion, the Justice Department has criminalized Mr. Trump’s right to free speech by charging him with knowingly spreading lies when he rallied Americans to stand against ballot fraud that he believed had tainted the 2020 presidential election.
Journalists should recoil at any suggestion that they become players in an impeachment inquiry beyond reporting the facts. Sadly, too many have allowed personal animus toward Mr. Trump to cloud their view of their role in the public discourse, and the American people have noticed. Gallup polling has shown trust in the media plummeting from a peak of 72% in the 1970s to a dismal 34% today.
The White House gambit exposes a lack of confidence, and those in the media would be foolish to discard their professional obligation to join the losing team.
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