Lies, damned lies...
And CBS “News."
A Media Beyond Caricature
The trust and prestige that took prior generations of journalists decades to earn have been thrown away in just a few years by incompetents and partisans.
Actually, the “trust” of which VDH speaks was misplaced, as was confirmed by the revelation of shitlib Walter Cronkite’s manipulative on-air machinations during the Vietnam War. And that’s before we even mention the whole Rathergate botch-job. Onwards.
CBS’s iconic 60 Minutes has had plenty of scandals and embarrassments in its long 57-year history, most notably the fake-but-accurate Dan Rather mess. Yet never has it found itself in greater disrepute than in 2024.
Donald Trump, for good reason, recently declined to join 60 Minutes for its traditional election-year in-depth interviews of the two presidential candidates. Why?
Last time he consented in 2020, anchor and interviewer Leslie Stahl attacked Trump’s accurate assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop (then in the possession of the FBI) was authentic—and authentically damning to Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.
Stahl falsely claimed the laptop “can’t be verified.” She further incorrectly asserted, “So this story about Hunter and his laptop, some repair shop found it; the source is Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.” The New York Post, in fact, reported the story. The FBI did not deny it.
Yet old Twitter and Facebook, under collaborating FBI tutelage and pressure, suppressed dissemination of the truth. Joe Biden’s then-advisor and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in conjunction with former interim CIA Director Michael Morrel, helped round up “51 former intelligence authorities” (among them Leon Panetta and both John Brennan and James Clapper, who had admitted previously of lying under oath to Congress) to claim falsely that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information gambit to warp the election.
Joe Biden used the “expert” consensus to further lie in the last Biden-Trump debate that the laptop was cooked up by the Russians. And neither CBS, the “intelligence authorities,” nor any of the Bidens have ever since apologized.
Apologize, Victor? Boy, talk about your forlorn hopes, that one’s gotta take the cake.
Just as CBS is no longer the network television standard, so too has the current generation of partisans done their best to sully the New York Times. Within just a few days, the Times embarrassed itself in ways similar to the partisanship so toxic at CBS.
Sorry if my correction smacks a wee mite of obnoxious pedantry, but nobody had to "sully" the Old Grey Whore; she sullied herself, over a period of decades upon decades of misrepresenting 190-proof shitlib propaganda as unbiased journalism.
The Times and CBS are just a small example of current once-prestige outlets—such as ABC (cf. its moderators during the Harris-Trump presidential debate) and NPR (that just retracted its scurrilous charges against journalist Rich Lowry)—who have consistently abused the public’s trust for the partisan benefit of progressives or their causes.
In sum, the trust and prestige that took prior generations of journalists decades to earn have been thrown away in just a few years by incompetents and partisans—on the ancient, flawed principle that the supposedly superior moral ends justify any means necessary to achieve them.
Ahh, that familiar, hoary old liberal shibboleth, straight out of Marx. No coinkydink, that. Trump was perfectly correct when he described Praetorian Media as the enemy of We The People, and contra the esteemed VDH’s too-modest closing assertion, it’s been this way for a helluva longer than “just a few years."