"I'm a journalism!" hapless Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum says in one of my favorite memes — a favorite because sometimes it takes a meek moron's malapropism to express what we were all thinking.
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Poor Ralph. He never quite understands what's going on around him, but he always wants to help. Then there are Washington’s actual journalists — I’ve called them many other names over the years, none of them nice — who surely understand much but seem only to push partisan narratives.
That's how Ralph's "I'm helping!" while standing uselessly around became "I'm a journalism!" Some versions of the meme show Ralph with a finger jammed up his nose, as if for emphasis.
The everyday reporter brings biases — and increasingly, a near-total ignorance of anything that might add essential context. My concern today isn't with them because they're just following the lead of media types much higher up the food chain.
So let's take a look at three of the bigger fish: the publisher, the talking head, and the fact-checker.
What is a journalism? Whatever it is, it isn't what the New York Times does. In an address this week to the Notre Dame Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger required a few more words — and infinitely more self-regard — to demonstrate a hapless confusion Ralph would find familiar.
"The business model that funded original reporting is failing," Sulzberger noted. "About a third of all newsroom jobs have disappeared in the past 15 years. Hundreds of newspapers have gone out of business, and they continue to close at a rate of more than two a week."
Sulzberger seems to think journalism can cling to an outdated business model with correct-thinking people like himself at the top. Stick a pin in that thought because I'll come back to it later.
Sulzberger’s real problem, according to Sulzberger, is that his noble profession has been undermined by lumpenproletariat hostility whipped up by the Bad Orange Man.
The only industry more preening in its self-regard is the entertainment industry — and at least they wait for awards season. Journalism congratulates itself year-round. Puffed up like an Aaron Sorkin character — and with as little sense of irony — Sulzberger insisted, "As rising inequality and impunity undermine confidence in the American promise, the press asks the tough questions and exposes the hidden truths that enable the public to hold powerful interests accountable."
Oh, please.
There are few interests in this country more powerful than the NYT, and the paper's accountability is best measured, as Paul McCartney put it, "If you'd started at nothing and counted to zero." Even if the NYT no longer enjoys its old reputation among the broader public, Sulzberger’s paper still sets the agenda for newsrooms across the country — and beyond. Sulzberger knows this and wields his paper's influence like a club. Maybe his frustration stems from having fewer and fewer small papers to bully.
I've covered the NYT's misdeeds for almost a quarter of a century (really!), but they go back at least as far as com-symp Times reporter Walter Duranty covering up Joseph Stalin's starvation campaign against Ukraine in the early 1930s, under the guise of "journalism." Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer, which the paper still proudly displays — despite the award being for lies that helped cover up a genocide.
All this while, as Sulzberger put it, "a historic surge of misinformation erodes our shared reality."
Which "historic surge?" That Biden was fine? That healthy young people needed an experimental vaccine for a respiratory infection that mostly affected the elderly and the already ill? That Donald Trump is a dictator?
So when Sulzberger complained that his profession "finds itself facing the most direct challenge to its rights and legitimacy," he ought to look in the mirror.
I could go on and on — I've been at this for almost 25 years, after all. Instead, I'll just put on my hipster Sulzberger glasses and my best Ralph voice and say, "I'm a journalism!"
What is a journalism? Whatever it is, it isn't what Jake Tapper does — propaganda? Partisan hackery? Mean Girls Chief Unity Enforcer? I've written so much on Tapper in recent months that I'll keep this section as brief as possible. You can't possibly need more than a refresher by now, right?
The Federalist's Shawn Fleetwood did the hard work on this one: 9 Times Jake Tapper Dismissed Biden’s Decline, Claimed He’s ‘Sharp Mentally.’ Tapper's excuse? He was lied to! By politicians and White House staffers!
Jake Tapper on Biden’s cognitive decline:
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) May 13, 2025
“The White House was LYING not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to their own cabinet. They were lying to White House staffers, they were lying to Democrats in Congress about how bad things had gotten.” pic.twitter.com/LHp0AqtJtd
Why, I never.
Journalism's first unwritten rule is — or used to be — "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." In other words, take nothing for granted before publication. Tapper got lied to and repeated those lies to you and me for years, without ever checking them out. And that, gentle reader, is the kindest possible interpretation. The more likely one is that Tapper used his perch to knowingly cover up for a demented Democrat POTUS.
Let's set the Wayback Machine for Oct. 18, 2020, back when Biden's decline was already obvious to anyone with two eyes and one ounce of integrity:
On October 18th, 2020 Lara Trump suggested that Biden was showing signs of cognitive decline. Jake Tapper flipped out on her. How dare she diagnose Joe Biden!
— MAZE (@mazemoore) May 13, 2025
Nine days later Jake Tapper had Mary Trump on for a 10 min segment to discuss Donald Trump's mental illness and decline. pic.twitter.com/9ZZcCuHrJ8
There are many more examples involving many other stories, but the short version is that Tapper acts as though his job is to be the media's Chief Scold. But while he's putting on moral airs, those of us in the know are not-so-quietly laughing at whether he's a bigger dupe than a liar or the other way around.
Where is the apology for Mary or Lara Trump? Where is Tapper's accountability? Where is his integrity? Maybe the better question is, "Why should Tapper give a damn about either one when he'll make bank off a book meant to cover his a** more than reveal any truths?"
Let me be even more blunt.
Imagine that Joe Biden had been in charge of a foreign occupation* instead of serving as our unduly elected president. As soon as we'd driven them out, Tapper would've had his back up against the wall, right alongside the other collaborators.
And Another Thing: *I understand and even appreciate the argument that Biden effectively presided over a foreign invasion — but that’s beyond the scope of this week’s essay.
Tapper's book — coauthored with Politico's Alex Thompson — is this week's cause célèbre in D.C. for all of its tawdry new insider revelations, but, as I've noted previously and ad nauseam (literally, I could have thrown up), "Original Sin" is notable mostly for what it lacks.
Say it with me now: Tapper accepts no accountability for his part in the coverup — and neither did the media's so-called fact-checkers.
BTW @GlennKesslerWP gave this claim 4 Pinocchio's. Biden was out of the race 3 weeks later.
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 15, 2025
He hasn't answered for it since, and I'm guessing this didn't make the book. https://t.co/atOT70sImb
What is a journalism? Whatever it is, it isn't what the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler does. Kessler has run the Post’s “Fact Checker” column for nearly 15 years — as both editor and chief writer. Ostensibly devoted to sniffing out B.S. from politicians and even other reporters, on Kessler's watch, The Fact Checker does no such thing.
This is from AEI's Christine Rosen in 2023:
Kessler’s meals have since proved to be less “food for thought” than partisan Soylent Green. A quick scroll through the Fact Checker’s work reveals lots of Pinocchios for Republican politicians and Fox News hosts but only the gentlest admonishments for Democrats. Kessler wrote, for example, that there are merely “reasons to doubt” President Biden’s recent claim that, as a child in 1961, he and his father saw two men kissing in Wilmington, Delaware, and that his father uttered a line straight out of a Hallmark Channel movie: “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.” Rather than call Biden a liar for telling this highly suspect story, one he’s repeated often and never the same way twice, Kessler wrote that Biden’s story has “evolved over time.”
At the time, Kessler labeled X's crowd-sourced and crowd-checked Community Notes as "trolls" for catching him peddling lies about George Soros's money funding the campaign of progressive Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Let me repeat that, slowly: Glenn. Kessler. Writes. The Fact Checker.
Kessler writes that column — and the Washington Post publishes it — without concern for the facts or their reputations. It's nice that WaPo owner Jeff Bezos cleared out the worst of the deadwood from the paper's editorial page, but it's the newsroom and their editors that need an Agent Orange cleanse followed by a napalm rinse.
Apropos of nothing except that it happened today and made me smile, when my old online acquaintance Physics Geek called Kessler "a lying jackwagon of a hack," I told PG that he was being too kind.
Seriously, you have no idea.
And Another Thing: For whatever it's worth, in March, I let myself get snared by some fake (but very juicy) quotes from a SCOTUS opinion. Within minutes of the discovery, I updated my column with this:
The quotes I pulled from the Ninth's decision that were originally published below came from a PDF that I can't find and, thanks to a heads-up from Eugene Volokh, appear to have been completely made up.
Whether that was due to some short-lived prank or an AI hallucination that got quickly pulled, I have no idea. But the point is that those quotes appeared nowhere other than a since-vanished PDF and this column... which is embarrassing as all hell.
My apologies for getting suckered by a hoax, a hallucination, or whatever that was.
Thus endeth the update, with a red face and a vow not to repeat that mistake.
It sucks having to take my lumps out in public like that, but that's what accountability looks like.
Blogger "Joe Motivator" performed an analysis of Kessler's "Lie Tracker" feature from Trump's first term, and this is what he found: "Of the 3,319 'lies' that Glenn Kessler documents on his Trump 'Lie Tracker,' a whopping 94.5% of those lies are by Glenn Kessler, not Trump."
Kessler, peddler of lies, remains the Washington Post's chief fact-checker. Last week, the Museum of Political Corruption named Kessler "as this year's winner of the Nellie Bly Award for Investigative Journalism, praising his work as a 'testament to the power of fact-based reporting.'"
What is a journalism? Whatever it is, the long and prosperous careers of practitioners like Sulzberger, Tapper, and Kessler prove that it requires no accountability. The same talking heads and Democrat operatives with bylines who parroted the same lies from the same politicians about Biden's accelerating mental and physical decline will continue parroting whatever the Cause requires. The faces and bylines remain the same; only the lies change.
"From its beginning, our nation has recognized journalism as an essential ingredient for democratic self-governance," Sulzberger said this week. "The founding fathers enshrined this insight in the First Amendment, making the press the only profession explicitly protected in the Constitution."
But there’s the rub. Sulzberger and the rest of journalism’s self-appointed gatekeepers seem to think the First Amendment is theirs — that it protects their profession, not our activity. Journalism isn’t a protected priesthood — hoarding "misinformation" under the mattress while spoon-feeding curated "truths" to the rest of us.
Free speech doesn’t emanate downward from the lofty heights of JOURNALISM; it radiates outward from 330 million Americans exercising their God-given and constitutionally protected right.
So when you want the very latest breaking news, go to X, where millions of users with boots on the ground crowd-source important events in real time. When you want insta-analysis with accountability, come to PJ Media.
It’s with more humor than sadness that I remind you: The same Washington Post that publishes Kessler’s column still features “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its masthead.
The real irony? Today’s publishers, talking heads, and fact-checkers have their heads stuck so far up their you-know-whats that they’re not just reporting from the darkness — they’re the ones who flipped the switch.
Last Thursday: Skynet Might Be Fiction, But It’s Coming for Our Jobs
