Over the last few days, the Washington Post has really had a come-to-Jesus moment with the Biden administration and Kamala Harris.
Not only has the paper published a scathing piece on Harris’ economic plan, but another journalist just called out the publication and all fact-checkers for their failures during Trump’s time in office.
Talking Points…
- Fact-checking Trump
- WaPo admits failures
- Analysis
I would wager that no president in our country's history has been fact-checked more than Trump. To be clear, I have zero problems with the media fact-checking anyone, as long as it is done properly, and that was not the case when Trump was in office.
I am the first person to say that Trump is often a bit loose with the facts when he talks, but so is every politician. Yet only Trump was fact-checked word-for-word rather than the core of a statement. For instance, at one point, Trump rounded up a number from something like $6.7 million to $7 million, and the media said he lied. That is how nitpicking it got with Trump.
On top of that, the media treated any new statement by Trump as a lie, even if it had not been investigated. We need to look no further as to how the media treated the Hunter Biden laptop, Trump’s claim that COVID originated in a lab in Wuhan, and the intelligence letter used against Trump during the Biden campaign. The media stopped fact-checking and just went right to calling Trump a liar. Yet, when Joe Biden took office, a serial liar, the media backed off the daily fact-checking.
Washington Post columnist Meghan McArdle blistered the fact-checkers across the board for having a mission rather than doing their jobs. Their mission was to undercut Trump’s credibility at all costs, even the truth. Instead, when the fact-checkers were found to be wrong, it only helped Trump, and at the same time, it showed the American people just how biased the media really is toward the left.
McArdle blistered the fact-checkers for being so focused on Trump and ready to prove him wrong at every turn. They wanted to save the world from the bad orange man, but they started to censor the truth instead. She wrote:
"Some of their efforts have been useful, including fact-checking Trump’s more frenetic flights of fancy.
"But the larger effort has been repeatedly marred when the disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true and spreading information that was false."
She then offered up examples of the missteps fact-checkers made along the way, writing:
"Recall when it was ‘misinformation’ to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a ‘Russian information operation’ rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop.
"If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified ‘cheap fakes.’"
What struck me most about that piece was admitting that the media was in the tank to accept what the White House said as truth, such as the cheap fakes against Biden, rather than checking them to prove their validity of falsehood.
Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have sat across from reporters and told lies about Donald Trump telling people to inject bleach or calling neo-Nazis very fine people, and they have not said a word of pushback on statements that have been debunked dozens of times. They created lies by Trump, and they allowed lies by Dems simply because they did not like the man or his politics. The media has failed the American people, but even now, only one outlet appears ready to own up to its failures. That is the state of the media in this country today.
