John Loftus (Daily Caller)

The no good, very bad week started on a Monday, a Black Monday for American media.

And it only took three, maybe four hours, for the week to turn sour. A wall of lies, built up over what feels like forever, came crumbling down as cable news panels and prestige newsrooms worked themselves up into a frenzy.

First, it was Jeff Bezos and the drama playing out at his own newspaper, The Washington Post. On Monday evening, the WaPo owner threw down the gauntlet on a mini rebellion that had been brewing since the paper refused to endorse the preferred candidate of its legion of activist reporters, Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an op-ed that lacerated the establishment media’s complacency and its failure to halt the cratering trust among readers outside the Beltway, Bezos all but called for a regime change within his own news organization. He even chided the more self-important, hysterical employees — such as the war fetishist and imperial vampire, Robert Kagan —  for “complaining” too much on social media about the non-endorsement of Harris, or else resigning in protest, as was the case with Kagan and a third of the editorial board. (Stream Daily Caller’s documentary ‘Cleaning Up Kamala’ HERE) 

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion,” Bezos wrote. “It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

Around the same time that Bezos was dropping a hellfire missile on his decrepit village of complacent and smug news-gatherers, The New York Times was teaming up with the DNC hatchet-men over at Media Matters in their long-continued effort to harrass and censor Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson.

 

Texts posted by Carlson on Twitter show a Times reporter, Nico Grant, reaching out to the conservative media icon about a story on “election misinformation” in his YouTube videos. It’s the kind of story and angle that gets old, crusty boomer, die-hard Times readers in Westchester County and suburban Connecticut absolutely titillated to the max. That uncouth nativist and class betrayer spreading lies about the election again? How dare he! Censor him!

You also can catch a glimpse of the Media Matters agenda pretty clearly: to whip up an advertiser boycott campaign against Carlson and hopefully have him booted off the platform. That’s probably the Times’ agenda too, right? To see a competitor, and on a deeper level, an ideological enemy, punished for challenging the paper of record and its official Narrative™ on how the world works and how it ought to work.

Carlson’s response? “Fuck off.”

Now over to CNN, the network that tried so half-heartedly in the era of CEO Chris Licht to rebrand from 24/7 Donald Trump fear porn to something somewhat resembling a centrist, straight-news outlet.

A CNN panel Monday night exposed an unspoken law in the upper echelons of American media: that brown people have the privilege to lay it on thick no matter what, that they do not have to follow any rules of civility and ever act charitably, while white conservatives appearing on opposition networks have to leap around all the politically-incorrect landmines like Swan Lake ballerinas.

Conservative journalist Ryan Girdusky clashed with CNN host Abby Phillip and pro-Palestinian panelist Mehdi Hasan over the media’s overblown coverage of Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, which liberal pundits compared to a bona-fide Nazi rally. Hassan, of course, suggested that Girdusky was a Nazi. Girdusky, without missing a beat, suggested that Hasan was a terrorist in a tasteless joke about his beeper going off, a reference to Israel detonating the pagers of Hezbollah operatives.

Later that same night, CNN banned Girdusky from ever appearing on the network.

“There is zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air. We aim to foster thoughtful conversations and debate including between people who profoundly disagree with each other in order to explore important issues and promote mutual understanding. But we will not allow guests to be demeaned or for the line of civility to be crossed. Ryan Girdusky will not be welcomed back at our network,” the network said in a statement.

 

The whole fiasco raised an important question: Why is it that liberal pundits have the license to smear conservatives and Republicans as Nazis whenever and wherever, but the one time a conservative fires back with a similarly low accusation, the latter is considered a heinous thought crime? If CNN executives and producers had any spine and integrity whatsoever — which they don’t — they would sit down Hassan and Girdusky for a special segment where they would hash it out and discuss why pundits need to stop flinging absurd smears at each other, such as “You’re a Nazi for supporting Trump” and “You’re a terrorist for supporting Palestinians.” They won’t, because they protect their own and hold outsiders to a ridiculous standard.

Finally, on Tuesday night, the beltway insider rag, Politico, kicked into spin mode after President Joe Biden called half of America, all those deplorable Trump supporters, “garbage.” Biden was responding to the racy joke about Puerto Rico cracked by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s rally Sunday at MSG. Here’s how the outlet covered Biden’s divisive remark in its Playbook newsletter:

According to Biden — who later clarified the remark — he was referring specifically to TONY HINCHCLIFFE, the shock comedian whose racist joke about Puerto Rico ignited a political firestorm at Sunday’s Trump rally in NYC.

According to Trump and Republicans — who heard the quote as ‘supporters,’ plural — it was a blanket denunciation of Trump voters, one reminiscent of HILLARY CLINTON’s ‘basket of deplorables’ gaffe back in 2016.

I’m less offended by Biden’s comment than by Politico’s attempt to cover it up. No, Biden was not “referring specifically” to Hinchcliffe. He was calling Trump supporters garbage. We all heard it with our own ears.

Politico’s star reporter Jonathan Lemire also resorted to using the White House’s doctored transcript of Biden’s remark that included an apostrophe after the word “supporter” to indicate the president was referring to Trump’s “supporter’s” demonization, the comedian’s supposed act of demonizing Puerto Ricans, not Trump’s supporters themselves. Again, we heard the comment with our own ears, but Politico is going to rely on the clean-up duty transcript massaged by the White House propagandists to tell us what’s official and what’s not.

This week has made me even more cynical of American media. I don’t think there is any hope for it. They promised to change after Trump was elected in 2016, and nothing changed. Bezos might promise to change now, but nothing will come of it. The lack of social media, the lack of transparency, in the 20th century, the pre-internet age, allowed legacy newspapers and corporate media to appear objective. It gave them too much power, and they got too drunk off it. It allowed them to control the narratives subtly while selling themselves as clear-eyed truth-tellers. It gave them too much power, and they got too drunk off it. They thought then, and still think now, that it would last forever.

But it was a false dawn. Next week and the weeks after and next year and the years after (if these organizations are still around at the end of this century), we will see the same old tired lies crumbling before our eyes.

It wasn’t just bad week for American media. It was a bad era.