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Even as defeated Democrats try to decide who they are and what they believe in, their media handmaidens face a crisis of their own.
The comeuppance against their politically driven bias has arrived — and it’s proving to be expensive in more ways than one.
Recent days have reconfirmed that their war against Donald Trump is their most egregious assault on truth and fairness, but it was hardly the first or only.
CNN was caught this week boasting it helped free a desperate Syrian prisoner from a government slaughterhouse in Damascus.
Problem is, the man was quickly unmasked as an intelligence officer for the hated Assad regime, which the embarrassed outlet now acknowledges.
Reporter Clarissa Ward and her crew fell for the ruse because they ignored a cardinal rule of caution: A story that is too good to be true usually isn’t true.
ABC News and its chief Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos fell into another trap.
They put their agenda of defeating Trump ahead of the facts and the law, and, faced with depositions that likely would have supported his claim of defamation, ABC caved.
In a settlement, the network forked over $16 million for a Trump library and his legal fees, and had to publicly say they “regret” Stephanopoulos’ false claims that Trump had been found liable for rape in a civil case.
Ouch — the apology surely stung much more than the money.
A third case is from the past, but it is instructive in its own way.
Now that a North Carolina woman finally admitted the charges of rape she leveled against three Duke lacrosse players in 2006 were fabricated, the media pile-on during that era looks even more outlandish.
Day after day, the feeding frenzy pitted white male privilege against the poor black dancer they hired — and supposedly raped.
The facts were murky and disputed from the start, but that didn’t stop the hysteria.
Once again, the charges fit a preconceived narrative, and any facts that didn’t align were damned, along with presumptions of innocence.
Even after the headline-hunting local prosecutor stepped aside and the North Carolina attorney general declared the players innocent, it was too late to repair the damage.
Even more so now, the admission by Crystal Magnum that she made up all her claims offers little solace to her victims.
Will the media also apologize?
Don’t hold your breath.
America’s First Amendment rights have given birth to a powerful free press that is the envy of the world, but the sharp decline of public trust has reached a record low.
Only one in three adults say they have some or a great deal of confidence in mainstream media reports, according to an October Gallup survey.
Reputations overboard
No doubt there are several reasons for the finding, but none as central as the media’s willingness to abandon facts and fairness in the pursuit of an agenda.
Too often, the goal is not to inform, but to persuade.
Large legacy outlets, such as the networks and The New York Times, earned their once-solid reputations because they set a standard of restraint, but they have thrown their reputations and standards overboard in their quest to destroy Trump and impose their radical leftist values on America.
The contradiction in calling him a Nazi and declaring him a threat to democracy while supporting Dem efforts to lock him up and keep him off the ballot would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.
And now the piper must be paid.
Unfortunately for them, Trump has the means and the will to fight back.
And he has been proven right in major instances.
Take his decision to sue ABC and Stephanopoulos.
It looked like an expensive lost cause — until suddenly they surrendered and he was vindicated.
As he warned in his press conference Monday, he’s not done.
He said he would sue an Iowa pollster and the state’s largest paper, The Des Moines Register, for election interference, and he did exactly that several hours later.
Findings by the pollster, Ann Selzer, that were released three days before the election showed Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points. It was a potential earthquake since all other polls predicted Trump would win the state easily, and the Selzer poll gave Dems hopes Iowa would flip blue and that other states would too.
In fact, the poll was off by an astounding 16 points, with Trump winning Iowa by 13 points.
And rather than other states flipping, Trump won all the battlegrounds.
The Selzer poll, he said, wasn’t an honest mistake but was “intentional” and designed to “influence the outcome.”
Selzer and the Register have denied the charge, but her explanation for the giant size of her mistake is less than persuasive.
According to Semafor, she suggested her poll might have served to “energize and activate Republican voters.”
She’ll have to do better than that if Trump gets court approval for depositions, and so will the Register, which is owned by Gannett.
The paper endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 but made no presidential endorsement this year.
Shift back to the right
The fights over editorial endorsements roiling The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times offer another window into the media’s role in politics.
Fortunately, Post owner Jeff Bezos and Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong are pushing back against their Trump-hating staffs and demanding a better balance of news coverage and opinion voices.
In both cases, the owners blocked publication of Harris endorsements and said the papers would not back either candidate.
Some staffers left huffing and puffing and others threatened to quit but decided they’d rather keep the paycheck.
Trump is also continuing a legal battle against the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes, saying it defamed him when it rejected an earlier demand that it withdraw two 2018 Pulitzers.
The prizes went to the staffs of The New York Times and Washington Post for their coverage of the Russia collusion charge, which turned out to be a hoax instigated by Hillary Clinton.
‘Press is very corrupt’
He also said Monday he was suing CBS for deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris and author Bob Woodward over a dispute involving audio tapes.
“We have to straighten out the press,” Trump said.
“The press is very corrupt. Almost as corrupt as our elections.”
He added: “I’m doing this not because I want to. I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to.”
Personally, I wish the suits weren’t necessary and that the owners and editors of big media would return to the era of strict standards of fairness and a clear separation between news and opinion.
But with the rise of an unrestrained social media, and with the intense hatred of Trump that is expressed by many leftist journalists being rewarded with Pulitzers and other awards, there are few reasons to hope change will happen quickly or even voluntarily.
Thus, Trump’s legal war may be the only corrective that has a chance of success.
What a pity.