When Donald Trump staged his rally at Madison Square Garden two weeks ago, the New York Times and other legacy media publications were quick to imagine parallels to a “Pro America Rally” at the famed venue in 1939 when 20,000 people, many wearing Nazi armbands, filled the Garden in support of Adolf Hitler. Never mind there were many Jews who attended Trump’s rally, including a Holocaust survivor who made a video admonishing Kamala Harris that he knew more about Hitler than she did and emphatically declared that Trump was no Hitler.
Yet in its reporting of a pogrom in Amsterdam Thursday night where roving gangs of antisemitic thugs targeted and beat Jews in the streets, requiring Israel to send planes to rescue its own citizens, the New York Times and other legacy media publications ignored the parallels to Hitler and the rise of Nazi Germany. Although the media is supposed to hold politicians accountable, New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres called out the New York Times‘ bias and dishonesty.
Also silent was Dougie Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband and the vice president’s emissary to the Jewish community, who just days earlier was warning Jews that Trump was a threat, but the Mamala to his anti-Israel daughter would protect us and our homeland. Emhoff was also silent on his wife’s administration quietly lifting sanctions on the Palestinian Authority governing the West Bank on election day, despite determining that the government’s leaders are paying imprisoned terrorists and fomenting violence in breach of U.S. law.
The New York Times has an undeniable bias against Israel, and reading Ira Stoll’s commentaries in the Algemeiner makes that clear. The publication feigns concerns for the safety of Jews and another Holocaust when it suits the Times‘ purposes and provides an opportunity to forward its preferred narratives. The Times also trumpeted Emhoff as representing a new masculinity that is supportive of spouses, which also was a lie. Emhoff admitted he cheated on his first wife and impregnated his daughter’s nanny after it was reported by The Daily Mail.
Readers of the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, and those who get their news from CNN and MSNBC are no doubt feeling unsettled and possibly betrayed. They were assured, including by Kamala Harris, that President Biden’s rumored diminished mental acuity was right wing media misinformation. The denials continued even after the Wall Street Journal on June 4 published this story written by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes that Biden’s mental decline was indeed true and of concern to those who had interactions with him.
Does anyone possibly believe that Linskey and Hughes were the only two reporters in Washington who were aware of Biden’s decline?
Yet, the denials continued, with Joe Scarborough, one of a legion of Democratic political operatives on the DNC’s MSNBC network, going so far as to attack the Journal for its supposedly false reporting. Watch the clip of Scarbourough in the accompanying video, who unbelievably is still on the air.
The New York Times more than two weeks after the Journal reported on Biden’s decline published this story, co-written by a reporter specializing in “misinformation”, advising its readers that videos purporting to show Biden’s decline were edited or lacked “context”.
Six days after the Times assured its readers that Biden was well, the president had his disastrous debate with Trump, and all the world witnessed his mental decline. George Clooney, the actor who called for Biden to step aside in an op-ed published by the New York Times, said he was aware of Biden’s decline weeks before the debate. Yet, only the Wall Street Journal dared to write that story.
When Nancy Pelosi and other Democrat elders reportedly forced Biden to drop his reelection bid under the threat of invoking the 25th Amendment, the corporate media dutifully fell into line, abandoning their earlier narratives about Kamala Harris’ incompetence and ineffectiveness. The New York Times published such a story in February 2023 and the Atlantic published this story on October 10 of last year headlined, “The Kamala Harris Problem – Few people seem to think she’s ready to be president”.
No one accused the authors of the Times‘ and the Atlantic‘s critical stories about Harris of racism, sexism, and misogyny, but many Democrats, including Obama, tarred those who didn’t believe Harris was qualified to serve as president with those labels.
Rather than accept responsibility, Pelosi and other Democratic party elders have turned on Biden, saying if he had stepped aside earlier there would have been an open primary that might have picked a more viable candidate to take on Trump. In July, after Pelosi shunted Biden aside, she posted: “God blessed America with Joe Biden’s greatness and goodness.”
Pelosi is an example of why I so despise politics and most politicians. If Pelosi believes Biden’s failure to step aside earlier was responsible for her party’s electoral drubbing, she should blame her myrmidons in the corporate media.
Had the corporate media fulfilled its Fourth Estate function and served as the public’s Beltway watchdog, they would have reported about Biden’s decline well before the Wall Street Journal did. That would have forced Biden to drop his bid for re-election in sufficient time for the Democrats to hold an open primary.
As well, if the corporate media aggressively held Democrats accountable with the zeal they do Republicans and Trump, Pelosi wouldn’t have dared to anoint Harris as the party’s presidential candidate. She and her other Democratic co-conspirators correctly assumed the corporate media would dutifully embrace Harris and promptly shove their earlier critical reporting of the vice president down the memory hole.
Given that the media’s trust and credibility with the U.S. public ranks almost as low as Congress, one might expect the corporate media post election would be chastened. That’s hardly the case. If I were editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, I’d be running stories acknowledging the media’s myriad failures and publishing thought pieces about how the industry could regain the public’s trust. Instead, CJR is running defiant stories intended to make corporate media reporters continue feeling good about themselves.
Here’s some representative headlines:
CRJ’s editor is Sewell Chan, formerly a top editor of the Los Angeles Times and someone who played an instrumental role in that publication’s deserved decline.
The Starkman Approved 2024 Chutzpa of the Year award goes to the Washington Post’s editorial page, which blamed the Democrats for covering up Biden’s decline and “sacrificed their credibility”. The Post’s editorial board should look closer to home and ponder the legions of talent that exited the publication under the leadership of former editor Sally Buzbee. During Buzbee’s tenure, the Post lost half its readership and racked up more than $100 million in losses.
Among the departures was former deputy business editor Damian Paletta, who returned to the Wall Street Journal earlier this year to oversee the publication’s Washington coverage. WSJ editor Emma Tucker is big on scoops and within months of Paletta’s arrival the Journal published its blockbuster on Biden’s mental decline. Notably, Paletta co-authored a damning book about Trump’s handling of the pandemic and some journalists previously expressed concerns he couldn’t objectively cover the Trump campaign.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid was the runner-up for the Chutzpa of the Year award with her feigned concern about Trump being a threat to the LGBTQ communities. Reid in 2018 came under fire after posts that mocked homosexuality and claimed to out people as gay were found on her old blog, The Reid Report. Reid, a Harvard educated Democrat who previously worked for Obama’s Florida presidential campaign, claimed that her website was hacked and that she didn’t write the controversial articles. Anyone who believes that likely still believes Biden is “fit as a fiddle”.
If the corporate media had a sincere desire for reform, a bidding war would be underway to hire Paletta. Major publications also would be aggressively trying to recruit Jennifer Jacobs, the former Bloomberg senior White House reporter I highlighted in my previous post who was aware of serious security concerns within the Secret Service months before the first Trump assassination attempt. Another highly sought after reporter would be Catherine Herridge, who CBS News fired earlier this year supposedly because of budget cuts but there was speculation she was targeted because of her dogged critical reporting on the Biden family’s business interests.
Herridge on the eve of the election posted an explosive on-camera interview with two IRS whistleblowers involved in the Hunter Biden tax case who said they were instructed by the Justice Department not to ask questions about Joe Biden in advance of the 2020 election. The whistleblowers said the FBI knew from the outset that the New York Post’s “laptop from hell” reporting was authentic, yet more than 50 Deep State spooks signed a letter saying it was likely “Russian disinformation”.
The legacy media understandably ignored Herridge’s explosive report as it undermined Democratic and corporate media warnings about Trump politicizing the Justice Department.
Sorry, Trump haters, if you are looking for people to blame for Trump’s election and you subscribed to corporate media publications like the New York Times or got your news from MSNBC and CNN, you were inadvertently complicit in returning Trump to the White House. If you continue to support these disgraced media outlets, be mindful of the adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.”