The legacy media tends to get rather agitated whenever former President Donald Trump calls them out at a rally (as he often does). The resulting chorus of loud boos does nothing to mitigate their barely concealed contempt for the 45th president.
But criticism of said media is wholly appropriate. Indeed, it is even more critical as we enter the home stretch of a presidential election wherein the legacy press has fallen beneath even its usual minimum standards for dispassionate reporting.
Many on the left attempt to minimize the foregoing truths. After all, who wants to admit they are in the tank for one side against the other? But right-leaning flyover America is by now wise to the media’s smoke and mirrors routine — so much so that the mask of neutrality has morphed into a punchline during the Trump era.
A brief review of recent journalistic history speaks volumes: An allegedly impartial media happily covered for Hillary Clinton’s declarations as to the ways and means she utilized to destroy her communications devices, and for a clearly disabled John Fetterman, a clearly disabled President Joe Biden, all the malicious (and incriminating) material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, for the “Trump is a Russian agent” hoax, for the Stalinesque show trial in Manhattan, and for the absence of science-based guidance in the latter stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
They even (attempted to) cover for their alleged “shock” at the confused and disoriented Biden in the aftermath of the first presidential debate between the former and sitting president in June.
But all that cover was mere prologue for the present attempt to reintroduce Vice President Kamala Harris as a … “moderate.” Yes, the same California progressive they were attempting to remove from the ticket this time last month; the same Kamala Harris of word salad and open borders and bail-fund fame; the same Kamala Harris who had a revolving door of staffers for the entirety of her tenure as vice president.
That all this cover is achieving a degree of short-term success is not surprising. Momentum is easy to generate when the media picks sides and you are never pressed on difficult questions (or any questions for that matter) and Hollywood celebrities, woke billionaires and the cashless bail crowd have hopped aboard your progressive bandwagon.
There is, of course, a big problem with all this cover. In a word: “video.” And, so, middle America will soon watch, listen and discern a plethora of videos depicting Vice President Harris’ enthusiasm for single-payer healthcare, fracking bans, Supreme Court “reform,” open borders, “reimagining” law enforcement, equivocation and lack of moral clarity towards Israel, Green New Deal subsidies, Nixonian price controls and especially, the Biden-Harris administration’s relentless desire to force biological women to compete against (and take showers with) biological men.
The cover campaign will then proceed to Revisionist Warp 5, as in a full-court press — to not believe your lying eyes — or your lying brain. In other words, a free flight from reality whereby one is “unburdened” by all the things Biden-Harris broke over the past four years.
But video can be so powerful. And those video-laden Trump commercials are going to be a lot of fun this fall (a few are running now). I suggest they will be quite effective in the end.
Bob Ehrlich is a former Governor of Maryland, Member of Congress and State Legislator. He is the author of five books on American politics and opinion pieces that have appeared in America’s leading newspapers and periodicals. He and his wife, Kendel, can be seen and heard on their weekly podcast, “Bottom Line with Bob & Kendel Ehrlich.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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