OPINION:
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After President Biden was goaded by conservative media and lawmakers to take a break from his vacation in Utah and visit the damage incurred by the devastating wildfires in Hawaii last month, his consolation tour was largely panned by those on the trip.
At one point, Mr. Biden compared the destruction in Maui — where over 100 people have died, hundreds more remain missing and the town of Lahaina was completely leveled — to a small kitchen fire in his own home that once threatened his wife, cat and beloved Corvette. The octogenarian president then appeared to fall asleep at a gathering with residents.
Mr. Biden, who campaigned on his “civility” and “empathy,” showed neither of those qualities during his several hours on the island. Was this Mr. Biden’s “Katrina moment,” when the mainstream media would savage him as then-President George W. Bush was for being “detached and uncaring” in the face of massive human suffering and loss?
Absolutely not.
USA Today and fact-checkers at other esteemed news outlets were put on assignment to watch a video of the Maui gathering to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Biden was, in fact, awake while visiting with residents.
“No, Biden did not doze off during an event for Maui wildfire victims,” USA Today wrote, clearing up any misconceptions presumably brought on by bystanders’ and video viewers’ lying eyes. “Higher-quality footage of the event shows Biden’s head is bowed but his eyes are open and blinking.”
Glad that got cleared up.
It should be noted that the Fourth Estate doesn’t merely cover for Mr. Biden on trivial matters like his propensity for catnaps. The protection racket runs far deeper than that.
Last week, George Washington University lawyer Jonathan Turley — who has closely monitored the Trump collusion hoax, the Jan. 6 court trials and other legal proceedings — was contacted by The Washington Post.
Mr. Turley has repeatedly called out the newspaper’s false claims in previous reporting that former President Donald Trump ordered his attorney general to clear out Lafayette Park for a photo op (untrue), that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian misinformation (untrue), and that Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign wasn’t spied on by the FBI (it was).
Most other mainstream media eventually acknowledged and begrudgingly reported these facts as more evidence came to light. But not the Post. Instead of receiving an apology and securing corrections or retractions to previous stories, what Mr. Turley received was a double-down on the false narratives.
“The Washington Post stands by Philip Bump’s reporting, and your characterization of his articles as ‘false’ is incorrect,” the Post wrote Mr. Turley in a letter he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Post stands by its erroneous reporting even as its in-house fact-checkers dedicate their time and resources to explaining why Hillary Clinton wasn’t indicted over her emails, why explosive Hunter Biden laptop email revelations need “context” and why Republicans in Congress “overhype” the findings of their investigation of the president’s troubled son.
As news broke late last month that Mr. Biden used pseudonyms as vice president to hide communications with his son in various email exchanges, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC dedicated exactly zero minutes to a story that, if investigated, could very well lead to bribery charges against the sitting president.
It’s an open-and-shut case of bias by omission from the Fourth Estate: If you don’t see it and can’t read it, it doesn’t exist. The slanted coverage gives mainstream journalists more time to focus on Jan. 6, MAGA extremists, and Mr. Trump’s alleged misdeeds and mounting legal battles.
The White House press corps is so tainted with anti-GOP bias that reporters accept wild accusations by the Biden administration against its political opponents and pass them along largely as truth.
Earlier this year, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said from the White House lectern that House Republicans urging federal spending restraint want to “fill our cities with smog,” “give asthma to kids,” poison children, and allow “oil companies to use toxic chemicals that cause severe burns, damage people’s eyes, and quite literally melt bones.”
No one in the room laughed or questioned her hyperbole, rhetorical overkill fit for the satirical Babylon Bee. Reporters nodded their heads in solidarity at the absurdity of a presidential spokeswoman arguing that Republicans want children to die.
In April, Ms. Jean-Pierre argued that Republicans were effectively “fighting to put fentanyl on the street by defunding [the] Border Patrol. … The only things House Republicans are committed to giving Americans are increased crime, lower economic growth, and more manufacturing jobs sent back to China.”
If fact-checkers were on the job, they would know that Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee introduced legislation to beef up border security, resume border wall construction and hire 22,000 Border Patrol agents to support local law enforcement. It was liberal Democrats who wanted to “defund the police,” pushed inflation to a 40-year high with $1.9 trillion in stimulus funding, and shipped jobs to China through their radical, anti-business climate agenda.
Alas, the fact-checkers were otherwise occupied, parsing such items as Mr. Trump’s response to Mr. Biden’s 2024 presidential announcement and the former president’s assertion that “you could take the five worst presidents in American history, and put them together, and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done to our nation in just a few short years.”
Spoiler alert: The Post — cherry-picking a poll of historians and presidential scholars from the Siena College Research Institute — found that Mr. Trump ranked third from the bottom in a ranking of U.S. presidents, whereas Mr. Biden came in at No. 19.
So Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, the Post concluded, is America’s worst recent president.
Job done. Narrative preserved.
Democracy truly does die in darkness, and few in the mainstream news media nowadays want to shine their light where it is needed most. Instead, they’ve signed up as propagandists for the Democratic Party.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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