JUST THINK OF THE AP AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE:

Hodgkinson also visited the office of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign he had worked on as a volunteer, and was in email contact with the two Democratic senators from his home state.

As conservative journalist and video maker John Tabin tweets, “Amazing how a simple switch in party affiliation can turn a headline into a minor detail” that was buried 11 paragraphs into an article astonishingly headlined, “FBI: Gunman who shot congressman had no target in mind.”

TRUE: Trump Didn’t Ruin the Media, Obama Did. “Obama was the first indicator that the media would simply refuse to cover stories they didn’t like about a politician they did. The media covered Clinton’s Chinagate and Travelgate. But they refused to cover the IRS scandal with the same level of vim as they would have under Bush; they downplayed the Obama administration’s involvement in the botched “Fast and Furious” gun operation scandal; and members of the mainstream media openly mocked the right’s anger over the administration’s manipulation of the 2012 Benghazi terror attack. Obama had to be protected at all costs, including the cost of the media’s credibility. Meanwhile, the media savaged 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.”

Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. The thing is, nobody much cares what party operatives have to say.

JUST THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE.

Shot:

Back in February, I was riding on the New York to DC shuttle and CNN’s own Jeff Zucker was seated in the row behind me with a woman I took to be a colleague or personal assistant. She was yelling loudly into her phone, loudly enough that the other passengers took note of it, at one point escalating her voice to say: “If they want war with CNN, they got it.” When we landed, I noted the likely inspiration for the call: the administration had offered Mike Pence to every network except for CNN.

—Ben Domenech, “CNN’s War On Trump Is Going Swimmingly,” yesterday.

Chaser:

The media brag that they now more or less run the Democratic agenda. Univision’s Jorge Ramos (whose daughter worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign) recently thundered:

Our position, I think, has to be much more aggressive. And we should not expect the Democrats to do that job. It is our job. If we don’t question the president, if we don’t question his lies, if we don’t do it, who is going to do it? It’s an uncomfortable position.

In other words, Ramos confessed that the Democratic party apparently has neither new ideas nor a political agenda that would win over the public, and thus self-appointed journalistic grandees like him would have to step forward and lead the anti-Trump opposition as they shape the news.

Fellow panelist and CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter answered Ramos, “You’re almost saying we’re a stand-in for the Democrats.” Thereby, Stelter inadvertently confirmed Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s widely criticized but prescient assertion that the media are in fact “the opposition party” — and should be treated as such.

—Victor Davis Hanson, “Progressive Media & Democrats Form New Anti-Trump Party,” May 30th.

Hangover: Proud Sponsor of President Trump’s Nightly ‘Assassination’ — CNN’s Parent Company Time Warner:

In the next scene the Trumpian Caesar is attacked by the Senators and stabbed to death as an American flag hovers overhead, according to Sheaffer. “They had the full murder scene onstage, and blood was spewing everywhere out of his body.”

Among others, guess who proudly sponsors this nightly wish-fulfillment in the bloody, live and in person! assassination of the President of the United States of America?

Time Warner, the parent company of CNN.

“And keep in mind that this is the same CNN that led the charge to destroy the career of a rodeo clown for the sin of wearing an Obama mask,” John Nolte adds at the Daily Wire.

CNN’S JOHN KING ADMITS MEDIA WILL BURY COMEY’S ‘DAMNING ACCOUNT’ OF LYNCH’S BEHAVIOR ON HILLARY:

While the Comey hearing into Russia was and remains a big story, CNN’s John King admitted Thursday afternoon that the media will not give much (if any) attention to Jim Comey stating that he was disturbed by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch telling him in the midst of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal that he should refer to it as “a matter,” not “an investigation.”

“A number of significant things. One, this won’t get much attention because it’s in the rearview mirror but a pretty damming account from Jim Comey there about Loretta Lynch, the former Attorney General in the Obama administration and her handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation. It won’t get much attention, but that was pretty damning,” King admitted.

Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

JUST THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Dylan Byers admits on CNN that reporters tell a progressive story defined by Obama and Hillary.

Earlier: “Why would you trust a campaign?”

OF COURSE NOT. THEY’RE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES. Eddie Scarry: Trump Can’t Win The Press.

The mania over James Comey’s firing would carry more weight if the press didn’t behave this way every time President Trump signed an order, wrote a tweet or flushed a toilet.

Political commentators, news organizations and lawmakers on both sides had been calling for Comey’s ousting for months for his bizarre, inconstant approach in conducting the sensitive investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails and then Trump’s election campaign.

But now that he’s gone, the media act like America just lost its favorite uncle.

Everyone is now used to the simple fact that no matter what he does, Trump cannot win the press. And that’s why no one should look to it for an indication of whether he’s doing anything right.

Depending on what mood the Washington media wake up in on any given day, Trump is either dumb and expected to screw up (i.e. Charles Blow wittily referring to Trump in every column as “president” in quotes) or it’s, Hey, why isn’t he doing everything like a normal president? Constitutional crisis!

Most of them don’t actually seem to know what a “constitutional crisis” is, but then, most of them couldn’t pass a simple quiz on the Constitution.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Cruelty of Blue:

Years of false promises, years of “compassionate government”, years of ignoring arithmetic, comes to this: Puerto Rico in the grip of a massive, man-made disaster. . . .

This could have been avoided by sensible and timely cuts, by turning a deaf ear to public sector union demands for wages and salaries, by a series of small but definite steps away from the blue model, welfare state governance. But the press, certainly including the NYT which is now reporting the disaster, would have attacked any politicians taking these steps as “harsh”, or “cruel to the poor”.

Now Puerto Rico is in a deeper hole, with much more suffering than any of the moderate cuts would have imposed.

Unfortunately, a number of cities and states on the mainland are walking down the Puerto Rican highway toward bankruptcy and disruptive adjustment. There, the liberal press is still hailing the politicians who are willing to plunge their cities and states into chaos for the sake of popularity: the press often calls them bold, innovative and visionary. They have a lot of ideas about the things they want to do with other peoples’ money, while people who insist that budgets must be cut, and that pension obligations be met, are still being attacked for everything from racism to sadism.

It’s as if the press is just a bunch of Democratic operatives with bylines, who care nothing for truth or the greater good of society if it threatens Democratic priorities.

FAKE NEWS? Old-school journalists ‘pissed’ about Gayle King’s vacation with Obamas:

Gayle King’s serious CBS colleagues had a lot to say about her recent yacht jaunt with former first couple Barack and Michelle Obama in Tahiti, and it wasn’t positive.

“The ‘Capital J’ journalists are pissed and raving mad that she was on a yacht with the Obamas over the weekend. The old-school people were talking about it. She shouldn’t be doing that. She’s an anchor of a news program that covers the White House. You’re held to a different standard. It’s one thing to be friendly. It’s another thing to go vacationing on a yacht,” a source told us of the backlash at CBS.

CBS is denying that there’s any rancor internally directed at King, which makes sense, considering that her colleague Charlie Rose pretended to have no clue about candidate Obama’s foreign policy stance on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, and last year sat with two of Obama’s speechwriters while all three laughed on air about the Big Lie of Obamacare — the over 36 times Obama told Americans, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

CBS Nightly News anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley once compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers, and admitted recently to accepting at face value the Hillary campaign’s story and not investigating further the cause of her infamous collapse on September 11th last year.

John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” This was followed last year by his asking Obama, ‘Is honesty overrated as a presidential quality?’

And the boss of CBS’s news division is David Rhodes, the brother of Obama’s infamous former deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes.

Just think of them all as Democrat operatives with bylines and lavaliere microphones, and it all makes sense.

CBS’S SCOTT PELLEY LOSES A FIGHT RIGGED IN HIS FAVOR: Ever since it was created by Don Hewitt in 1968, CBS’s Sixty Minutes has functioned as a sort of ritual kabuki for its audiences: it made stars of its left-leaning investigative journalists, who would grill the offending conservative politician or businessman of the week. By the mid-’80s, the show’s formula was summed up brilliantly in the classic parodies by Martin Short’s Nathan Thurm character on Saturday Night Live, who would be drenched in sweat and chain-smoking Marlboro 100s by the time he was done attempting to survive the hammering from the crusading journalist on the other side of the desk.

But CBS made its bones during the days when, as Rob Long wrote of NBC’s Johnny Carson, “There were three big channels—and maybe an old movie on one of those fuzzy UHF stations—so if you didn’t like what was on, you were out of luck. Network television didn’t compete with cable channels or Hulu or Amazon Prime. It competed with silence.”

And such lack of competition allowed the networks’ news divisions to create self-contained worlds where they could absolutely control the dialogue, as Walter Cronkite did throughout his career at CBS, while signing off each night “And that’s the way it is.” His successor’s career at CBS ended there with a Sixty Minutes segment…well, we all know how it ended there, right?

Which brings us to CBS’s Scott Pelley and his recent interview with Mike Cernovich, whom Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis describes as “a lawyer, independent blogger/author/filmmaker, and a dominant voice on Twitter,” and whom BuzzFeed describes as “a troll.” The latter Website of course is home of the infamous Trump golden showers with Russian hookers story and an editor who believes covering Trump “sometimes…means publishing unverified information in a transparent way that informs our users of its provenance, its impact and why we trust or distrust it.”

Whatever Cernovich’s excesses, assuming this transcript of the full unedited interview is accurate, it’s fascinating much more for what it reveals about Pelley, watched by six and a half million viewers on the CBS Evening News, than for Cernovich. Here’s how the transcript begins:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.

Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What’s the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let’s find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That’s the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That’s not a narrative I’m familiar with. Who’s narrative is that?

In 2008, Pelley compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Ben Rhodes, who until January was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” Katie Couric, whom Pelley succeeded as Evening News host, read a poem on her broadcast to shill for the passing of Obamacare, and after leaving CBS had a Rathergate-like moment of her own, attempting to marginalize gun owners.

But back to the transcript of Pelley and Cernovich, where eventually, the hunter is captured by his prey:  

Scott Pelley: You wrote in August a story about Hillary Clinton’s medical condition the headlines said, “Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s disease. Position confirms.” That’s quite a headline.

Mike Cernovich: Yeah, Dr. Ted Noel had se-sent a story to me anonymously, that I checked out, analyzing her medical condition. And –

Scott Pelley: It isn’t true.

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, she doesn’t seem to have any signs of Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day caught by a citizen journalist.

Scott Pelley: Did you, well, she had pneumonia. I mean –

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, because that’s what was reported.

Mike Cernovich: By whom? Who told you that?

Scott Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.

Mike Cernovich: Why would you trust a campaign?

To ask the question is to answer it. In a post headlined “‘Shamefully Stupid’: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in His Favor,” Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis adds in response, “Pelley has no answer for those six words — ‘Why would you trust the campaign’ — as his entire profession goes berserk with literal-minded fact checks for every tweet from President Trump. Pelley also seems to forget the fakery that Clinton World attempted hours before its pneumonia statement — with the candidate smiling and waving outside her daughter’s apartment, greeting a little girl, and assuring reporters everything was a-okay.”

More:

Mike Cernovich: So let’s be, let’s be honest with one another, which is that you are reporting that the Hillary Clinton campaign-

Scott Pelley: I didn’t report that she had Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Cernovich: You just told me she’s healthy though. Based on what was told to you by the campaign. See? That’s what I’m saying about the double standards which is I don’t take anything Hillary Clinton’s going to say at all as true. I’m not going to take her on her word. The media says we’re not going to take Donald Trump on his word. And that’ why we are on these different universes.

Scott Pelley: Why should anyone take you on your word?

Mike Cernovich: Oh, you should always double-check. You should always fact check. And if people don’t agree with me, people express that disagreement, and I’m completely, completely open to criticism.

Insert Glenn Reynolds’ Rathergate-era comments about the positive nature of the Internet being a low-trust environment here. Not to mention Michael Crichton’s Gell-Man Amnesia Effect.

Let’s give Pelley the exit quote: “Well, the benefit of intermediaries is having experienced editors check things out and research people. Check the facts before it goes out to the public. You don’t do any of that.”

Mary Mapes could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE: “Was Pelley not around in 2004?” John Hinderaker asks at Power Line. “Has he forgotten how stupid that refrain sounded then? (‘Layers and layers of fact-checkers’) Does he not realize how false it rings today? We have been here before: the liberal media are in a panic because their authority is being challenged. It must be worse now, though, than it was in 2004. Then, Time’s refrain was a relatively benign ‘Who owns the truth?’ Now, they ask, ‘Is truth dead?’ We can translate: ‘Is the liberal news media monopoly dead?’”

TO BE FAIR, HE’LL BE AT LEAST AS OBJECTIVE AS SHARPTON, MADDOW, BRIAN WILLIAMS, CHUCK TODD, AND ANDREA MITCHELL: Josh Earnest Named NBC News, MSNBC Political Analyst.

Just think of NBC News as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

BUT OF COURSE HE DID. Mayor De Blasio Connects Racist Murder to Trump, ‘Atmosphere Of Hate:’ “At some point, it would be nice if the media would notice that the left constantly uses this climate-of-hate argument to indict the right every chance it gets but denies any such climate exists when the target is a conservative or a police officer.”

Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and you’ll understand why they never will.

NO, BECAUSE THEY’RE DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Would journalists support congressional investigation of Obama surveillance of … journalists?

ANDREW MALCOLM: The truth about Trump’s worrisome war on media.

President Trump let slip the secret during his first news conference. Here’s what he told shouting reporters trying to trip him:

“I’ll tell you something, I’ll be honest — because I sort of enjoy this back-and-forth. And I guess I have all my life.”

As do his supporters and a good number of detractors, who’ve turned Trump appearances and his press secretary’s news briefings into TV ratings hits on cspan.org and cable.

Enough Americans have witnessed or perceived media misinterpretations and bias to enjoy seeing its elite members handed back some guff, even crudely. And there’s now a vibrant, imperfect social media on 24-hour online patrol.

Meanwhile, media members who blithely passed along Obama’s serial lies about, among many things, keeping your doctor and health plan under ObamaCare, are now on Alpha Alert for Trump untruths, visibly relishing each one.

The Washington media needs to stop whining, get off their high horse and do the jobs they chose, reporting accurately what a president says now and putting it in true context to what he said last year or last night.

It isn’t whining — it’s anger. And it may be with us a while, because the Democratic-Operatives-with-Bylines lost big in November, and the second stage of grief is the most difficult one to get through.

KURT SCHLICHTER: President Trump Has Been Far Too Nice To The Mainstream Media.

It wasn’t a press conference – it was a kinky dungeon session where masochistic journalists eagerly sought out the delicious pain Master T was dealing. Hack after hack stepped up, tried to play “gotcha.” and ended up whimpering in the fetal position. The best part was CNN’s Jim Acosta, fresh from whining about how conservative outlets now get to ask questions too, basically handing Trump the cat-o-nine tails. Dude, next time keep from talking yourself into more public humiliation by biting down on the ball gag.

The media’s safe word is “Objectivity,” but none of them uttered it.

The wonderful thing about Trump – and the thing that sets the Fredocons and wusspublicans fussing – is that he gives exactly zero damns about the media’s inflated and ridiculous self-image. He doesn’t pay lip service to their lie that they are anything but what Instapundit calls “Democratic Party operatives with bylines.” Trump called them the “the enemy of the American People,” to which normals responded with “Yeah, sounds about right.”

Read the whole thing.

THE FAKE NEWS PROBLEM, THEN AND NOW: At Tablet, James Kirchick explains “Why the left is also responsible for the proliferation of inaccurate information—and why the big beneficiary is Donald Trump:”

Now that Trump is in the White House, much of the media feels uninhibited in their campaign to destroy him, seeing the unprecedented nature of his presidency as license to get away with anything. Take Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of The New York Times. Since he was targeted by pro-Trump, anti-Semitic Twitter trolls last summer, Weisman—a man who is supposed to at least feign objectivity—has completely dropped any pretense of political independence. His own Twitter feed—like the feeds of a growing number of Times reporters—is a constant stream of anti-Trump invective indistinguishable from committed anti-Trump pundits like myself.

Why do I hold myself and Jonathan Weisman to such wildly differing standards? Because my job is to opine and provoke. His job is to accurately report on events, so that I know that the things I am reacting to are real, rather than the products of angry mass hallucinations or partisan messaging campaigns. By publicly refusing to do his job, he makes my job (and all our jobs as engaged citizens) much harder because I can’t reasonably trust that what I read in The New York Times is factual or based on good sourcing. Who in their right mind inside the Trump administration would talk to The New York Times, except to mislead the paper’s reporters and editors, by spinning them up or sending them off on wild goose chases that serve the administration’s own aims? How can I trust that what I read in the paper’s news columns isn’t hopelessly distorted by the angry bias evident in the social-media feeds of the paper’s editors and reporters? Much of the reporting on the Trump administration thus far seems to be so poorly sourced, riddled with caricature and negative wishful thinking as to be actively misleading, for all intents and purposes “fake news.” The beneficiary of the resulting confusion and hysteria is not The New York Times or its readers. It’s Donald Trump.

But Kirchick’s take doesn’t feel all that far removed from how left-leaning media critic Jack Shafer, then with the Washington Post-owned Slate described the state of the MSM in May of 2008, with an assist from the since-deceased Michael Crichton:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.

* * * * * * * *

“[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality,” he lectured. “Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk.”

* * * * * * * *

As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

That was nearly decade ago, building on an article that Crichton wrote a quarter century ago. And yet things have only gotten exponentially worse for the media in the years since, passing through their quasi-religious hagiography of the Obama era along the way. Just think of the MSM as Democrat party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

UPDATE: Mark Hemingway on “The Problem of Two Unreliable Narrators: Trump Versus the Media — When both the person in power and his critics are both perceived as lacking credibility, the person in power is likely to come out on top.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: It’s Not 1934, writes Mickey Kaus:

Yet those who adhere to this unnamed tendency — let’s call it ’34ism, unless you can come up with a better name *** –allow the power of their terrifying dream to overwhelm sober consideration of everything Trump does or intends to do, good or bad (on trade, taxes, regulations, immigration, etc). We’re supposed to draw up sides — condemning (and ostracizing) those who are “complicit” in Trump’s administration and welcoming those who “stand on the right side of history” — even before we know whether the authoritarian seed will grow or wither, disregarding all the other positively auspicious seeds (reform of trade, control of borders, fewer foreign miliary adventures,  ending the Republican threat to Social Security and Medicare, etc.) that might flourish instead. In Slate 34ist Yascha Mounk’s head it’s practically Life During Wartime already, with brave Trump critics fired from their jobs, sleeping on the couches of their secret colleagues in the Resistance. Keep the car running.

Suggested alternative: See what happens first! Don’t let the reaction to Trump be dominated by one extremely unlikely bad possibility, at the expense of nurturing the far-more-likely good possibilities.

Those asterisks above connect to a footnote from Mickey that “Better name ideas [are] appreciated — just put them in the comments section below [his post], or tweet them to @kausmickey.”

The month after Obama won the election in 2008, Virginia Postrel noted that a lot of journalists (read: Democrat operatives with bylines) had heavily invested in the notion that it was the 1930s all over again, and had a major case of what Virginia dubbed “Depression Lust,” and were busy cranking out “Depression Porn” in service to the Office of the President-Elect. Not least of which was Time magazine’s infamous cover of Obama Photoshopped into the second coming of FDR and the headline “The New, New Deal,” thinking it was a compliment, and not an ominous prediction of an economy as similarly atrophied as Roosevelt’s. Pretending that Trump is Hitler allows you, oh brave foot-soldier in the DNC-MSM, to pose as the new Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It’s simply the funhouse mirror image version of the same sclerotic meme.

For the modern left, if the economy is relatively good*, and the incoming president has a (D) after his name, he’s the second coming of JFK (see: Clinton, Bill); if the economy is bad, and he has a (D) after his name, he’s FDR — and no matter what the shape of the economy, if the president has an (R) after his name, he’s Hitler (QED: Nixon, Reagan, Bush #43, and Trump).

* And it was, despite Clinton’s rhetoric. Would Time magazine lie to you? Well yes, of course. But look what they admitted in December of 1992.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Spicer: Media doesn’t treat Trump with respect, cheers on Democrats.

The media doesn’t treat President-elect Donald Trump with the proper respect, the man set to be the next White House spokesman said in an interview with The Hill.

Sean Spicer, a longtime GOP operative and strategist for the Republican National Committee, criticized a media landscape that he said mocked Trump even as it cheers on Democrats.

While he said the media seems to understand that Trump represents a larger movement after his presidential win, his remarks reflected longstanding antipathy on the part of the Trump team on how the businessman has been treated.

“There’s some positive aspects here and there, but largely it still continues to not treat him with the respect that he deserves,” Spicer said.

“I think for a lot of folks inside the beltway, and inside pundit-world, they don’t fully appreciate the understanding that he has of where the American people are,” Spicer continued. “They continue to mock him in ways, when it frankly just shows the lack of understanding of that they have of where the American people are and what they think.”

Spicer also criticized what he said are “countless examples” of the media cheering on Democrats.

“There are countless examples of the media engaging — overtly or covertly — cheering on Democrats and there’s no accountability. But it’s also not even frowned upon,” he said.

No, it’s cheered on by their fellow Democratic Party operatives with bylines.

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS:

Shot:

“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion*, just as effectively as by bombs.”

—Kenneth Clark, script for [1969 BBC TV series] Civilisation.

—“Almanac: Kenneth Clark on how civilizations commit suicide,” Terry Teachout, today.

Chaser:

Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State Supreme Court, Twelfth Judicial District described how…“A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.” There is no expectation that this will change, nor any efficacious public insistence that it do so. The crime level has been normalized.

Consider the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In 1929 in Chicago during Prohibition, four gangsters killed seven gangsters on February 14. The nation was shocked. The event became legend. It merits not one but two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended.

In recent years, again in the context of illegal traffic controlled substances, this form of murder has returned. But it has done so at a level that induces denial. James Q. Wilson comments that Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend. Even the most ghastly re-enactments of such human slaughter produce only moderate responses.**

—Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down,” the American Scholar, Winter 1993.

Hangover: CNN’s Don Lemon: Anti-Trump Violence Against Disabled Man ‘Not Evil.’

—Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media.com, today.

* A look at England in the decades after Clark’s epochal series ran is in its own way proof of that statement as much as Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago.

** Chicago hit the 500+ murder milestone for 2016 in September. It would hit almost 800 before the year was out.

Related: Lemon is far from the only member of the DNC-MSM loathe to examine this story. The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers does a whole lotta throat-clearing (and anti-Trump, anti-GOP virtue signalling) in the lede before laying out the actual details:

Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

WATCH A BUNCH OF JOURNALISTS FREAK OUT AFTER BEING ASKED IF THEY KNOW ANYBODY WHO DRIVES A TRUCK:

Which brings us to the simple question about truck ownership from John Ekdahl that drove Acela corridor progressive political journalists into a frenzy on Tuesday night: “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”

Rather than answer with a simple “no,” the esteemed members of the most cloistered and provincial class in America–political journalists who live in New York City or Washington, D.C.–reacted by doing their best impersonation of a vampire who had just been dragged into the sunshine and presented with a garlic-adorned crucifix.

Just think of the MSM as (urban elitist) Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense. And that parochialism has been deeply entrenched for decades. The MSM’s reaction to Ekdahl’s simple query yesterday is yet another example of how spot-on Saul Steinberg’s classic 1975 New Yorker “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover was, all the way to the present day, encapsulated in the theme of Dana Loesch’s recent book, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To.

FAKE NEWS: ABC News continues to “normalize” Donna Brazile as DNC chair.

Why is Jonathan Karl interviewing Brazile in the first place? And if he’s going to do that, how does one sit there and politely rehash the last election with her without poking the obvious elephant in the room? It has been 62 days since CNN severed their ties with Donna Brazile over the fact (no longer an “allegation”) that she cheated during one of the Democratic presidential primary debates and attempted to cheat during a second one in Flint, Michigan. And yet ABC News is inviting her to sit down for a casual New Years Day chat like any other political analyst.

There is not one reputable media outlet in the country who is even attempting to suggest that Brazile didn’t cheat or attempt to cheat on Hillary Clinton’s behalf during the primary. Even Brazile herself refuses to say that she’s innocent, instead preferring to insist that she will not be persecuted as if she were Jesus Christ or something.

I keep hearing media outlets complaining when any of their competitors provide coverage of Donald Trump in terms of his policy proposals, cabinet nominations and all the rest. The major charge they level is that these journalists are somehow “normalizing” Trump’s presidency. That’s a rather insulting phrase, since Trump actually won and must now be evaluated by the job he does. But isn’t it somehow worse to keep introducing Donna Brazile as the interim chair of the DNC and allow her to continue commenting on politics? Isn’t this an act of “normalizing” someone as the head of one of our two major parties while she’s known to have attempted to do more to directly tamper with an election than the Russians did? And where is the media outrage at the DNC for not removing this person who is known to be corrupt? All I’m hearing is crickets on that score.

We’re witnessing the “normalization” of a known cheat… a dishonest actor who was caught red handed attempting to corrupt a presidential election. This person has remained as the interim head of the Democratic Party for more than two months since being definitively exposed. And ABC News continues to propagate the fantasy that all is well and there’s nothing particularly notable about the situation.

Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: 9 times the media attacked Trump supporters.

There probably isn’t one particular thing that paved the way for a billionaire businessman-turned-reality TV star with no government experience to become the next president of the United States.

But reporters and political commentators took turns pointing to nearly every possible lead to explain what “created” Donald Trump: the Tea Party, CNN, talk radio, the Republican Party and the Left, among them.

Perhaps most notable was the blame placed on voters for exercising their right to select the next leader.

Here are nine times, in no particular order, the national media blamed the voters for Trump’s rise to the White House.

Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. And a lot of people have figured it out.

FAKE NEWS: “Not a single journalist exposed in Wikileaks was punished. Some were promoted. All will get awards.” Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. That’s how their colleagues and bosses think of them. . . .

THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Mainstream Media Scream: Media tries to delegitimize Trump’s victory. “Question is: Who did more to interfere in the integrity of the U.S. election? The American news media which forwarded its own ‘fake news’ to discredit Trump or, if Russia really is behind the hacking, Putin’s regime which disclosed some emails that revealed truths about what Clinton’s team thought of her opponents?”

KYLE SMITH: Keep crying wolf about Trump, and no one will listen when there’s a real crisis.

It’s contrary to the laws of nature for a tabloid writer to tell the gentry media not to go berserk. It’s like a cat telling his owner to stop coughing up hairballs or Iron Man asking Captain America to be less arrogant. Here at The Post, our mission statement does not include understatement. We provide journalistic Red Bull, not Sominex.

Nevertheless, a word of neighborly advice to our more genteel media friends, the ones who sit at the high table in their pristine white dinner jackets and ball gowns. You’ve been barfing all over yourselves for a week and a half, and it’s revolting to watch.

For your own sake, and that of the republic for which you allegedly work, wipe off your chins and regain your composure. I didn’t vote for him either, but Trump won. Pull yourselves together and deal with it, if you ever want to be taken seriously again. . . . Hysteria is causing leading media organizations to mix up their news reporting with their editorializing like never before, but instead of mingling like chocolate and peanut butter the two are creating a taste that’s like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.

Plus:

Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ characterization of reporters as ‘Democratic operatives with bylines’ is taking root in the American mind. Among independents, according to Gallup in September, the media had an approval rating of 30 percent; among Republicans 14. Almost everyone but Democrats think the media are biased, and support for that view goes way back. . . . This fall WikiLeaks confirmed everything conservatives have been saying about the media for more than 20 years. CNN, you have been busted. You allowed Democratic Party operative Donna Brazile to get hold of town-hall questions in advance and help Hillary Clinton prep with them. . . . John Harwood, New York Times/CNBC reporter and Republican debate moderator, you have been busted. You asked John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, for questions you could pose to Jeb Bush in an interview.

Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist and longtime phony “nonpartisan” political reporter, you have been busted. You reached out to DNC flack Eric Walker and asked for help putting together a “Passover-themed 10 plagues of Trump” story.

Not only are you evidently an undercover Democratic Party operative who should be drawing checks from the DNC instead of from The WaPo, you’re a tired hack who can’t even come up with his own column ideas without assistance.

Ouch. The truth hurts.

JOURNALISM: The NYT publisher and executive editor would like you to take them seriously now… now that they are done putting their all into getting Hillary Clinton elected. They’d like to be empowered for the purpose of undercutting President Trump. “I don’t know who’s supposed to be influenced by this. . . . Please, don’t go. I get that they’re saying that. But I don’t get the argument why we should stay. I see a promise to keep doing something they haven’t been doing. Or… a dishonest claim about what has been done and a promise to continue dishonestly. There’s no confession of bias, no admission of any need to do better.” Hacks gonna hack. Dem operatives with bylines gonna operate.

THE ROLLING STONE VERDICT AND THE END OF HONORABLE JOURNALISM:

The verdict against Rolling Stone is a punishment for journalistic malpractice—but it’s also something more. The case highlights the elimination of an honor culture in journalism and in public life. Vast majorities of people dislike journalists, not because journalists are liberal, although that’s part of it. Journalists are disliked because they act without honor. Such was the case with Rolling Stone’s fake rape story.

To understand the importance of honor in journalism, it helps to go back to one of the best examples of honest journalism in history. It comes from the former pages of Rolling Stone itself.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Rolling Stone’s False Rape Story Will End The Magazine.

I’m not at all sure I agree with that assessment, any more than RatherGate ended CBS News. In both cases, while those fabulist scandals exposed both institutions as being staffed by Democrat operatives with bylines, their brands are deep-pocketed enough to continue for quite some time. Even if Rolling Stone is sold, somebody will buy the brand for its boomer-era music cachet, just as there’s still a post-Washington Post, post-Daily Beast zombie version of Newsweek still on the Internet.

TIME-WARNER-CNN-HBO SPOKESMAN BILL MAHER PRETENDS TO APOLOGIZE FOR CRYING WOLF AT BUSH, McCAIN AND ROMNEY:

This is a remarkable mea culpa from Bill Maher on how he treated Republican nominees before Trump. pic.twitter.com/xIzt9Rj91S

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) November 5, 2016

In response, Iowahawk adds:

For anybody who can’t understand why their attacks on Trump just won’t stick:https://t.co/FldVcvSExh

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 5, 2016

.@JeffiBelcher @sahilkapur When the VP of the US told black voters Romney was for the return of slavery, the entire rhetorical wad was shot.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 5, 2016

Fun with Twitter searchhttps://t.co/wAKKGpiWVj

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 5, 2016

But then, long before Trump came along, the previous president or GOP candidate, who received brickbats and worse from the left is magically rehabilitated to bash the current nominee. Rinse and repeat, going back to Eisenhower and Goldwater.

This past July, Jonah Goldberg explored “How the Media’s History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump.”

Last night, responding to Maher, Stephen Kruiser wrote, “As he points out [in the above clip], Maher gave a cool million to the Obama campaign in 2012 to prevent Mitt Romney from being elected. In the last few weeks before the election, Democrats were portraying Romney (the man they now describe as honorable) as a sexist animal abuser who gave a woman cancer. Check back in four years to see if they’ve really learned anything about crying wolf.”

Similarly, file this prediction from Twitter user Chris Antenucci away for future reference: “Bill Maher and most liberals in 2020: ‘This year’s nominee, Rubio, is making Trump look like a moderate. He’s a radical on abortion.’”

That’s a remarkably safe bet. We’re seeing lots of mea culpas from the media and its critics about how badly it blew its reporting this year and how deeply it was in the tank for the Democratic nominee. But they could virtually be rewrites of the same faux apologies we’ve seen at the conclusion of every presidential election since at least 2004. And yet, “unexpectedly,” the MSM just never seems to learn from them, do they?

Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Politico Reporter Gets Caught AGAIN Sending A Story To A Clinton Staffer For Approval.

RIGGED, BY DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Donna Brazile’s debate question flap boosts ‘rigged’ narrative. “’Trump has stressed over and over again that the press is not just biased, but that parts of it have become effectively adjuncts of the Democratic Party,’ said Boston College political science professor Dennis Hale. ‘This certainly feeds that story.’” Ya think? If I were a Bernie fan, I’d be livid.

RIP STEVEN DEN BESTE: Glenn and Sarah Hoyt expressed their condolences yesterday, and I’d like to as well. The rise of the Blogosphere during the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was something to behold – the best analogy that I can think of is to compare it to the golden age of television in the 1950s: a new medium was born, and for those willing to seek it out, programming of a surprisingly high quality was available to be consumed on it.

But unlike television, which then as now requires an army of craftsmen and technicians to create, the early Blogosphere was almost exclusively a series of solo acts, and living in California, from about 9:00 PM to midnight Pacific Time each weeknight, I would eagerly consume the best of the new programming as it went online, usually (forgive me If my memory of the timing is a bit off) Den Beste around 7:00 or 8:00 PM, Lileks around 9:00 or ten o’clock, and then pre-Weimar era Andrew Sullivan around 11 or midnight. And of course, Glenn firing off new posts throughout the night.

Den Beste also demonstrated how infinitely flexible blogging could be. Glenn, Mickey Kaus, Sullivan and Virginia Postrel specialized in short posts offering news aggregation and commentary, but Den Beste seemed to effortlessly generate 1,500 to 3,000 word essays on the GWOT and other breaking news events every night. Of course, they only looked effortless to those of us reading them. I imagine the work that went into them eventually contributed to Den Beste’s health issues, and the merciless brickbats he received from the tolerance and diversity-obsessed left eventually led him to focus his blogging primarily on anime and other lighter fare.

As with the Golden Age of TV, which by the early ‘60s had collapsed into Newton Minnow’s infamous “vast wasteland…of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials,” the Golden Era of the Blogosphere was doomed to be a fleeting epoch as well. Today, blogging is universal, but also far too corporatist, an increasingly exclusive medium for Democrat operatives with bylines to pay homage to the state. But for a time, there were a plethora of individual voices to be read, and Den Beste’s was one of the most idiosyncratic and enjoyable.

“A software engineer by trade, exhibiting a precise logic in his thinking, Den Beste was acerbic, sharp and often charmingly irascible,” Jim Geraghty writes today in encomium. “I missed his playful cantankerousness when he had merely stopped blogging. He’s missed even more now.” RIP.

UPDATE: In his tribute to Den Beste, Ace of Spades compares the heyday of the USS Clueless as belonging to “a pre-professional blogging age (such as it may well be), a novice/hobbyist phase, when writers would just write about whatever interested them at that moment, whether it ‘fit the format’ or whatever. Rather like I’ve heard FM radio was when it first came out, as opposed to heavily-programmed/demographically-targeted AM.” Given the free-form, inventing techniques and terminology on the fly nature of the early Blogosphere, that’s an apt comparison as well.

THE MEANING OF IS: No, the Clinton campaign didn’t actually deny Dem operatives incited violence at Trump rallies.

Larry O’Connor:

Today, you’ll see many mainstream media reports saying Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook denied any involvement in the “bird-dogging” activities revealed by James O’Keefe’s video investigation released last week by Project Veritas.

But, did he really? I don’t think so.

As is typical with everything surrounding the Clintons, you need to really look at what he said and parse the sentence down to its actual meaning.

Of course Mook didn’t say anything that he could be pinned down on later. A lie is the default response from the Clinton Camp, and if pressed they will admit to only as much truth as they absolutely must.

This has been the Clinton’s SOP for more than 30 years, and the Democrat-operatives-with-bylines are usually all-too-happy to play along.

BUT OF COURSE: Ashe Schow: Media focus on Trump’s problems at Al Smith dinner, but not Clinton’s.

The Hill’s Joe Concha is fast becoming one of my favorite media reporters. He attended Thursday night’s Al Smith dinner, and has written an article called “Al Smith Dinner I attended was different than one I read about.”

Concha laid out some of what we’ve all heard in the media today about the zingers told by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We’re also being told that Trump delivered some truly terrible jokes that resulted in boos and jeering.

But what isn’t being given as much attention — except from a couple outlets — is that Clinton was also booed at times, though not as often as Trump. The Guardian pointed out a couple of jokes from Clinton that received some cheers and boos.

“You notice there is no teleprompters here tonight, which is probably smart, because it may be you saw Donald … dismantle his own. Maybe it is harder when you are translating from the original Russian,” Clinton said.

“I have deep respect for people like Kellyanne Conway. She is working day and night for Donald, and because she is a contractor, he is probably not even going to pay her,” Clinton said in another joke that didn’t do very well.

Concha notes that all the attention being paid to the boos and jeers toward Trump leaves out some important context.

“Republicans — especially those named Trump — aren’t popular in New York, and certainly with the wine and cheese crowd at the Waldorf last night,” Concha wrote. “And even Clinton got some boos and awkward reactions.”

He added that the event raised $6 million for children, more than it had ever raised before.

So while Trump was predictably booed at an unfriendly event, the media ran with it in order to smear him. Further, they ignored this same group booing Clinton. And the media wonder why their trust with the American people continues to plummet.

Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “Regardless of who is your chosen – or least favorite – presidential candidate, independent minds should be concerned about the latest revelations in the news media’s unseemly relationships with government and political actors. While there are many responsible journalists working today, inside documents and leaks have exposed serious lapses constituting the most far-reaching scandal our industry has known. It’s our very own Newsgate,” Sharyl Attkisson writes.

As a reminder, CEO Les Moonves said earlier this year of Trump’s campaign, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Its nightly news anchor Scott Pelley once likened global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes, and CBS pushed out Attkisson after her investigative coverage of Obama and Hillary’s Benghazi debacle.

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd and his wife, a Democratic consultant, hosted a dinner party at their Washington D.C.-area home last year for Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director.

Todd began his career working as a Democrat operative on the 1992 presidential campaign of “stolen valor” Congressman Tom Harkin; little has changed in that regard in his current job.

THE DISGUSTING MEDIA SAT ON SEXUAL ASSAULT FOR A PARTISAN VICTORY:

None of the stories that horrify them now are new. They are years old. Decades, even. It is mind-blowing that no one decided to drop any of this before now. Unless, of course, you believe the idea that they sat on it in order to destroy him in the general. What’s more, that they did so at the request of the Clinton campaign. It is not only plausible, it is in fact the most likely scenario. It’s not like the journalists just sat on their hands for a year before dropping all this. A little research, a few phone calls, and all of this information would have been out there much sooner. But, that didn’t help the agenda.

So, while some folks on the Right can (and should) take some of the blame for creating the monster that is Republican Nominee Donald Trump, the Media cannot be allowed to feel horrified for the monster they too helped to make. This is on them. They had stories, they chose not to run them. They chose to favor a candidate. They were too afraid to lose a source.

“The Media cannot be allowed to feel horrified for the monster they too helped to make.” I don’t know if that sentence was written incorrectly, but in any case, I wouldn’t worry much – they don’t feel at all horrified by the monster they helped to make. Just think of the MSM as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Kimberley Strassel: The Press Buries Hillary Clinton’s Sins.

If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women.

But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.

It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.

Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”

A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she’d done wrong. “Everyone wants her to apologize,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. “And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.”

Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton’s emails—three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a Republican plot.

A senior FBI official involved with the Clinton investigation told Fox News this week that the “vast majority” of career agents and prosecutors working the case “felt she should be prosecuted” and that giving her a pass was “a top-down decision.”

The Obama administration—the federal government, supported by tax dollars—was working as an extension of the Clinton campaign. The State Department coordinated with her staff in responding to the email scandal, and the Justice Department kept her team informed about developments in the court case.

Worse, Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show, took special care of donors to the Clinton Foundation. In a series of 2010 emails, a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton asked a foundation official to let her know which groups offering assistance with the Haitian earthquake relief were “FOB” (Friends of Bill) or “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs). Those who made the cut appear to have been teed up for contracts. Those who weren’t? Routed to a standard government website.

The leaks show that the foundation was indeed the nexus of influence and money. The head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ira Magaziner, suggested in a 2011 email that Bill Clinton call Sheikh Mohammed of Saudi Arabia to thank him for offering the use of a plane. In response, a top Clinton Foundation official wrote: “Unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check, this sounds crazy to do.”

The entire progressive apparatus—the Clinton campaign and boosters at the Center for American Progress—appears to view voters as stupid and tiresome, segregated into groups that must either be cajoled into support or demeaned into silence.

Well, yes.

WHAT IT TAKES TO GET THE WASHINGTON POST TO FACT-CHECK A RAPE VICTIM’S STORY:

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler took the time to sift through the 41-year-old case of Kathy Shelton, who said she was raped when she was 12 years old by a then-41-year-old man.

Ordinarily, I’d expect the Post to take Shelton’s claims at face value (and to be fair, Kessler does call her a rape victim, as her attacker, Thomas Taylor, agreed to a plea bargain). The Post would be accused of “victim-blaming” if it dared point out an accuser’s changing story, even if it ultimately seemed sympathetic to her.

But Shelton is different because she has told the press that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “took me through hell” and has appeared with GOP nominee Donald Trump.

This earns Shelton extra scrutiny. Kessler points out that she didn’t know until 2007 that Clinton was the defense attorney in her case, that she may or may not have been misquoted about harboring no ill will toward Clinton and that she said she had a psychiatric exam but court records say she didn’t.

These aren’t the “smoking gun” contradictions I would usually consider evidence of an untruthful accuser (and again, Kessler is not saying she is untruthful). Shelton could have hated a random, unnamed defense attorney until she found out it was Clinton, who by that point had become a household name. That would have been pretty devastating for a victim, to find out that a former first lady, U.S. senator and, at the time, presidential candidate was responsible for allowing your rapist to walk free.

In 2007, Shelton apparently told Glenn Thrush, who was then a reporter for Newsday, that she felt Clinton “was just doing her job” by representing Taylor. Seven years later, in 2014, she told the Daily Beast she was misquoted and that “Hillary Clinton took me through hell.” She could have been upset with an unnamed defense attorney, as I wrote above. Or she could have never thought about the other people involved in the case until she was shown an affidavit from Clinton claiming Shelton “is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing” and “has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body.”

Clinton merely said in the affidavit that she had “been informed” of these things about Shelton, but offered no source or proof. Shelton told Thrush in 2007 that she was shocked by the affidavit because “it’s not true” and she had “never said anybody attacked my body before, never in my life.”

It’s always “believe the women” until they threaten the career of a Clinton. Then it’s “a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty” and “look what you get when you drag a $100 bill through a trailer park.” And the press plays right along because, well, think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship.

AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE: “And there we have it in a nutshell. ‘Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’ That phrase, it should be pointed out, is not what ‘they’ say it’s a journalist’s duty to do. That phrase was satirical, uttered by the fictional Irish bartender ‘Mr. Dooley,’ the 1893 creation of Chicago Evening Post humorist Finley Peter Dunne. It was not intended to be taken seriously… In other words, give pain to those who don’t have it. What a motto, what a career description. Forget the five Ws, forget just telling the truth. Journalists are here to give pain to those they feel are too pain-free. And of course the press takes it upon itself to determine just who is comfortable enough to deserve affliction.”

Just think of the MSM as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

FLASHBACK: NETWORKS WORRIED ABOUT RELEASE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION WHEN IT HURT OBAMA.

Worried, actively suppressed – in any case, just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: How Journalists Purge Peers Who Don’t Lick Hillary Clinton’s Boots.

Related: 20 Mins on ‘Miss Piggy’ Remark, Silence on Cheryl Mills Immunity.

BUSTED: ADAM BALDWIN NOTICES BLATANT LIE IN CHUCK TODD’S LATEST HILLARY CLINTON REPORT.

Just think of the MSM as Democrat operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low, Gallup reports, “with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year:”

Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the entire trend, Americans’ trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans’ trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007.

Republicans Fuel Drop in Media Trust

While it is clear Americans’ trust in the media has been eroding over time, the election campaign may be the reason that it has fallen so sharply this year. With many Republican leaders and conservative pundits saying Hillary Clinton has received overly positive media attention, while Donald Trump has been receiving unfair or negative attention, this may be the prime reason their relatively low trust in the media has evaporated even more. It is also possible that Republicans think less of the media as a result of Trump’s sharp criticisms of the press. Republicans who say they have trust in the media has plummeted to 14% from 32% a year ago. This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years.

Why on earth would that be? Paul Krugman assures me his fellow DNC-MSM operatives with bylines are “objectively pro-Trump.”

(Classical reference “unexpectedly” in headline.)

I QUESTION THE PREMISE OF THIS HEADLINE: Hillary’s media is torching its standards to cover the election, Michael Goodwin writes in the New York Post.

Considering that we read earlier drafts of this same article in October of 2008 by then-ABC/PJM contributor Michael Malone and immediately after the 2004 election by then-Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, what standards are left?

Former CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson writes that until her debacle on the 15th anniversary of 9/11 (and fourth anniversary of Benghazi), Hillary’s health (or the lack thereof) “was ‘the stuff of conspiracy theorists’ until the reporters who appear to have been proven wrong, decided it was not. It’s almost as if we in the media take an editorial position with no factual basis, dare critics to prove us wrong, and then when events do, we modify our stance.”

Exactly. Or as Ann Althouse noted last month, “The media feel like lawyers for the Clinton campaign, taking whatever the evidence is and presenting it as advantageous to their client.”

It all makes sense when you think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines—and hopefully hazmat suits as well, when they’re flying with Hillary these days. Perhaps we should set up some sort of quarantine ward stat for these potential asymptomatic pneumonia carriers:

FIND A LOVE THAT LOOKS AT YOU THE WAY THE PRESS LOOKS AT HILLARY, this viral tweet correctly notes:

Just look at the rapturous expression in their faces — you can see them as well in a slightly different angle in this tweet from Andrea Mitchell, who’s just glowing — she can feel her future boss is this close to the oval office.

But note that the “blob’s”* expression also contains a healthy amount of fear as well – the media is very much the battered spouse in this relationship: “Clinton campaign warns media to tread carefully,” the Hill reports. As Steve Green asks response, “C’mon, media — you going to take this lying down?”

Of course they are. Because we saw the above image before. We see it every four years:

Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

* Classical reference.

UPDATE: “Did Hillary just tell Andrea Mitchell, ‘you’re my kind of woman’?”

UNEXPECTEDLY:  “‘CNN is so supportive of Clinton, network honchos acted like the Mafia when confronting [Dr. Drew Pinsky]’ a source told me. ‘First, they demanded he retract his comments, but he wouldn’t.’ What followed was a series of nasty phone calls and e-mails. ‘It was downright scary and creepy,’ a source close to Pinsky said.” Which is why “Dr. Drew loses show after discussing Hillary’s health,” the New York Post reports*.

Flashback: David Shuster suspended at MSNBC in early 2008 — a channel that was then at the height of its raucous Keith Olbermann slurring Bush nightly phase — for uttering the innocuous phrase, “Doesn’t it seem as if Chelsea is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” by the Clinton foundation. Chelsea was then 27 years old, and on her way to be being paid $600,000 by MSNBC’s parent network for filing less than two dozen stories, one of which was a hard-hitting take no prisoners interview with…the Geiko gecko.

Just think of the network executives as Democrat operatives with bylines – and in both cases, financial contributors to the Clintons’ slush fund – and it all makes sense.

WINSTON SMITH, CALL YOUR OFFICE: CNN, The Hill attempt to shield Hillary Clinton from her former KKK ‘mentor.’

Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense. CNN in particular can always be counted on dispatching a Democrat’s awkward allegiance with an openly racist longtime mentor into the memory hole during an election year.

JUST THINK OF THE MSM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “The media feel like lawyers for the Clinton campaign, taking whatever the evidence is and presenting it as advantageous to their client,” Ann Althouse writes.

Which brings us to media professor and early blogger Jeff Jarvis:

This is a journalism professor essentially justifying a presidential candidate avoiding scrutiny. Pretty amazing. pic.twitter.com/AD5t8aJBtW

— Jason C. (@CounterMoonbat) August 22, 2016

And note this:

If you call Fox and Breitbart media rather than political organizations https://t.co/RWClJag8L8

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) August 22, 2016

Now do ABC, aka, the House of Stephanopoulos; NBC, the home of Al Sharpton; CBS, whose news division president is David Rhodes, brother to self-immolating Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, and where the current host of Face the Nation advised Obama in 2013 to ‘Destroy the GOP’; and of course, the Clinton News Network.

HEY, IT’S TIME FOR A QUADRENNIAL COLUMN THEME: American journalism is collapsing before our eyes, Michael Goodwin writes in today’s New York Post.

I’m so old, I remember reading this column when it was titled “Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline” in October of 2008 by ABC and PJM contributor Michael Malone, and even when it was titled “The ‘Media Party’ is over”, by Newsweek and MSNBC contributor Howard Fineman at the start of 2005.

But if you think of the vast majority of “journalists” as being, in reality, Democrat operatives with bylines working feverishly as king- and queen-makers for their party, there’s no need to write columns tut-tutting the demise of Beltway journalism, which died a very long time ago, indeed.

WELL, WE KNOW THE ANSWER TO THAT ONE: What would media say about naked Hillary statues?

In a country once rocked for two weeks by the inadvertent appearance of Janet Jackson’s nipple at the Super Bowl, media condemnation of the objectively vulgar statue suddenly proved non-existent. The mood in the national press was rather jubilant and lauding.

The tone of the media wouldn’t concern if bias in its coverage of the presidential election and cultural affairs in America was not already so out of control.

Picture, if you will, a naked statue representation of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, erected (erm…) by cover of night in Times Square and on the boardwalks of Los Angeles, the sculptor’s artistic license given free reign. Imagine the sagging breasts, the flabby tum tum, the far-less-than-pert buttocks, and for the coup de grace, creative depictions of the male genitalia. Would the sculptor go very short, or very long?

It is impossible to quantify the rage that our media would unleash on the nation and heap upon sexist and racist, so-called artists. See, there is at this point, no irony in, no shame from, and no end to, the parade of contradictions that mainstream media will foist on its viewers and readers.

When it comes to Trump, the same rules simply do not apply. He cannot speak for himself; the media will speak for him. He cannot be entitled to dignity; the media will strip it from him however they can. And it’s not because he’s Trump. It’s not because he angered the fans of Univision. It’s because he’s Republican. If it were Jeb Bush, the statue in Times Square would have been of Jeb Bush; the media criticism all the same.

Anyone who’s honest will admit that the media has long favored liberals, but the bias has been worse than ever in this election season. Bashing a political figure’s looks, private lives, and even personally attacking their family members is totally fair game — as long as that political figure is a conservative.

Just look at the coverage on Melania Trump’s white dress at the RNC. Elizabeth Wellington, a fashion writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, suggested that Trump’s dress symbolized racism. “To many, that outfit could be another reminder that in the GOP, white is always right,” she wrote.

Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times wrote, “Ms. Trump’s choice of a white dress…sent all sorts of interesting subliminal signals.” Just a week later, Wellington gushed over Hillary Clinton’s all-white DNC outfit. “White is a hue that’s both soft and strong.

But it was appropriate: Her acceptance speech was a coming out of sorts. Clinton’s white pantsuit is telling us she has arrived. This is surreal. A dream come true….”

What would the reaction be if a mainstream journalist made even the slightest negative comment about Clinton’s or Michelle Obama’s attire at the DNC? What if they were called “too old looking,” “too fat,” “too weak”? We all know the answer to this question.

Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.