New York Post, Sunday, October 25, 2020nypost.comopinions
& ideas
The twisted
sex lives of
Nazis and the
women who
loved them
P. 38-39
per 100,000 residents are 40 percent
higher than in red states, according to
an AEI study. Of the first 210,000
deaths in the US from COVID-19, only
33,000 took place in red states.)
This week, even the most cynical
observer of the media — that would
be me — has to be dumbfounded at
the next-level failure by most elite
journalists to report on the volcanic
explosion of Biden family scandals re-
vealed by The Post’s blockbuster
scoop last week. To date, Team Biden
hasn’t refuted any aspect of the story,except a mealy-mouthed denial that
there was a formal meeting between
Joe Biden and Ukrainian energy exec
Vadym Pozharskyi, though they admit
there might have been an informal
one. The media and their bros in Sili-
con Valley set to work burying the
facts like mobsters in the woods, but
true stories cannot be given the Jimmy
Hoffa treatment. The Post’s traffic is
through the roof, and Biden’s lead in
top battlegrounds has softened. As
other outlets expand upon and con-
firm The Post’s reporting, Democratsare sounding a lot less cocksure than
they were two weeks ago.
Once, after getting it so wrong, the
media vowed to reconnect with the
people. Now their trick is to scream
“disinformation” about any informa-
tion inconvenient to the Bidens. Their
new holy cause of dragging a confused
old man across the finish line for the
purpose of making America weak
again will cost them a chunk of the
very little trust they have left.Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.T
he media tackled what
was happening in the sum-
mer and fall of 2016 like
the third string of the New
York Jets. They blew it.
They whiffed. They could
not conceive of a Donald Trump
victory, and so they portrayed this
event as a near-impossibility. To
their credit, they admitted it, and
they vowed to
do better next
time.
“If I have a mea
culpa for journal-
ists and journal-
ism, it’s that we’ve
got to do a much
better job of being
on the road, out in
the country, talk-
ing to different
kinds of people
than the people
we talk to... and remind ourselves
that New York is not the real world,”
New York Times editor Dean Baquet
admitted after the election.
CNN’s Van Jones dubbed the world
that the most vocal Democrats live in
“the resistance bubble” and criticized
Hillary Clinton’s failed election strat-
egy. “It turns out, ‘You suck. Vote for
me,’ is not a good slogan. It’s not a good
bumper sticker,” he said on a podcast
two years ago, while urging progres-
sives to open their minds to alternative
ideas. “We have to build up the capacity
to hold a lot of different views,” he said.
“I don’t have to say, ‘You are a bad per-
son. You are a bigot. You are a sexist.
You are a homophobe. Therefore, you
must agree with me.’ ”
It sounded promising. But what did
the media do after the dust settled and
Trump geared up for reelection? Like
a guy who comes out of rehab and
heads straight for the nearest martini
lounge, they relapsed. They couldn’t
help themselves. They went back to
putting 99 percent of their efforts into
telling themselves a story they all be-
lieved: that Donald Trump was not
just a horrible Republican president
— aren’t they all? — but an actual
threat to the Republic: Fifth Avenue
Hitler, Benito Trumpolini, Orange-
White nationalist. Virtually every na-
tional story they told the public ig-
nored heartland concerns and came
straight from the point of view of lib-
eral Manhattan — Fantasy Island. To
the media, Russia collusion is just
about to be proven after four years of
trying, Trump’s tweets matter more
than Trump’s economy, and a pan-
demic that hit harder in Western Eu-
rope is all his fault.
Instead of focusing on real Ameri-
cans who back the police, hate anar-
chists and don’t believe in forever lock-
downs, the media dubbed arson and
murder “mostly peaceful protests”
(CNN). “Help me find Trump’s ‘anar-
chists’ in Portland,” echoed Nicholas
Kristof of the Times, after two months
of street demonstrations that included
widespread vandalism, clashes be-
tween antifa mobs and the police, and
attacks on the city’s federal court-
house. The media mercilessly ridiculed
red states for supposedly not taking the
coronavirus seriously, and eight
months into it, it’s still the blue states
that have suffered by far the most casu-
alties. (In the blue states, death rateskyle
smithHysteria
repeats
itself
The
media
vowed to
do better
after being
wrong
about
Trump
in 2016.
But they
just got
worse.
The US media insists
on treating President
Trump as some sort
of Godzilla-like
threat to the republic
—even as he handles
the COVID crisis
better than Europe
and the US economy
rebounds.NY Post photo composite