It is an amazing thing to watch. In the lead-up to the annual winter convening of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside of Washington, there was the Associated Press running a story headlined:
Trump set to headline diminished gathering of conservatives
As this is written, I am at CPAC. And there is nothing “diminished” about it. Thousands of energized conservatives are surging through the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland. They have been listening to all manner of speakers -- U.S. Senators and House members, presidential candidates and, on Saturday, former President Trump himself. Yet what occurs in reading that Post article is that yet again the liberal media is simply unable to report fact.
This misreporting on this CPAC gathering comes on the heels of the news out of the Biden U.S. Energy Department and from FBI Director Christopher Wray that yes, in fact, it appears that the Covid virus was the result of a leak from that now-infamous lab in Wuhan China.
This after two years of a steady media drumbeat that to suggest this was even a possibility meant that those suggesting this -- notably Arkansas GOP Senator Tom Cotton -- must be dismissed for their "coronavirus fringe theory."
And that bit of nonsense followed on a three-year media drumbeat that Donald Trump had conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election from victorious Hillary Clinton. That too was decidedly false.
The real question here is why does this kind of thing happen over and over again? Why do sentient “journalists” repeatedly get caught reporting flat-out lies that have no truth to them whatsoever? And then they claim they are the Truth Tellers?
The answer to this was supplied right here at CPAC by the Media Research Center’s own founder Brent Bozell. On a panel with WMAL talk radio host Larry O’Connor, O’Connor noted that when the MRC was founded in 1987 there was “a quaint notion of media bias,” adding that “we’ve come a long way from just media bias haven’t we?”
To which Brent replied:
When we started in 1987, we went after this thing called liberal media bias. It doesn’t exist anymore. We’re not talking about a liberal media that could care less about the news. They don’t report the news. They’re weaponized. They’re Marxist! Many of them are Marxist.
Bingo.
The good news? The good news is that the American people are onto this. One poll after another has emerged in the last couple years summing up the same new reality. As headlined by Gallup in 2022 it was:
Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows
Bingo. They found:
Americans' confidence in two facets of the news media -- newspapers and television news -- has fallen to all-time low points. Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Both readings are down five percentage points since last year.
How much lower can it go? What kind of future do the badly named "mainstream media" face? Because of their own repeated actions, these lecturing leftists have self-sabotaged their own credibility.
Can they get it back? Can they regain a reputation for “just the facts” journalism?
Don’t bet the ranch -- because they have no interest in doing so.
