The establishment media is finally being exposed for what it really is — the propaganda arm for the hard left — and it’s a glorious thing to see. Two flagship media outlets, pillars of the “journalistic” establishment, have now lost defamation cases and must pony up millions as a result. This is extremely good news for those who value the truth and are tired of these moneyed, undeservedly respected propaganda outlets manipulating the American people.
A month ago, ABC and its far-left propagandist George Stephanopoulos reached a settlement with Donald Trump, who had sued them for defamation. The settlement involved the network forking over $15 million to Trump; it also precluded Trump’s suit from going to trial. which showed that ABC’s top dogs understood how weak their case really was: they were happy to pony up $15 million to make this thing go away rather than have a trial reveal just how far from actual journalism they had allowed themselves to stray.
On Friday, it was CNN’s turn. Fox News reported that “a jury found that CNN committed defamation against U.S. Navy veteran Zachary Young and is responsible for punitive damages on Friday after more than eight hours of deliberation. The jury ruled Young is awarded $4 million in lost earnings, $1 million in personal damages such as pain and suffering and said that punitive damages are warranted against CNN.”
That’s $20 million and counting in judgments against establishment who were caught manipulating and spinning the news while loudly and repeatedly insisting that they were telling nothing but the straight truth. CNN’s chest-thumping proclamation that it is the “most trusted name in news” has been a joke for years, but now it has been confirmed in court that anyone who trusts CNN probably also thinks that Old Joe Biden has been a capable, competent president and that Hamas is a valiant army of freedom fighters engaged in “resistance” against an “occupier.”
The rulings against ABC and CNN are sweet victory for those who have been insisting for years that the media was biased, only for far-left “fact checkers” and those same media outlets to dismiss any concern about their agenda, perspective, or accuracy as right-wing conspiracy theorizing.
After all, the news media has been a leftist mouthpiece for decades, but only since Donald Trump became a presidential candidate and then president of the United States did that become too obvious to deny. As far back as 1962, when Richard Nixon lost his race for governor of California, he excoriated the press for its leftist bias and famously declared: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
Nine years later, journalist Edith Efron published a book, “The News Twisters,” demonstrating that there had been serious media bias in media coverage of the 1968 presidential election between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey (and George Wallace). In 1978, ABC News reported that the Ford Pinto could explode if it was hit from behind. There was a nationwide outcry; only later did it come to light that the Pintos were exploding because an incendiary device had been planted on them.
In 1992, NBC News presented a rigged crash test, leading Don Hewitt, the executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” to claim that everything was on the up and up over at his shop. Referring to NBC’s fake crash report, he said, “If that had happened at 60 Minutes, I’d be looking for a job tomorrow. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anybody would do that. It’s not something anybody at 60 Minutes would do.”
Another lowlight for the media came in 2004, Dan Rather, the anchor of CBS Evening News and a respected “journalist” with a lengthy resume, ran with a story about 1973 memos that apparently showed that President George W. Bush, who was running for re-election, had shirked his duties as a member of the Texas Air National Guard and that his commanding officer had been pressured to give him a better evaluation than he deserved. Rather insisted they were authentic, but it quickly came to light that the memos had been typed on a modern-day computer, not an early-1970s-era typewriter.
CBS and Rather finally admitted that the documents in question (which, of course, could have given the election to Democrat candidate John Kerry) could not be authenticated. Faced with clear evidence that Rather was so avid to bring Bush down that he didn’t take basic and necessary precautions to ensure that the memos were authentic, CBS declined to renew Rather’s contract. For Rather, the anti-Bush memos had been too good to check.
But all that was child’s play compared to what goes on now. You want negative stories about Donald Trump? Just go to the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or CNN, or MSNBC, or any of the rest. The major establishment media outlets don’t even pretend to strive for objective reporting anymore, while they benefit from the indifferent and uninformed segment of the public’s assumption that they’re still engaged in it.
Related: A NewsGuard ‘Fact Checker’ Sent Me Some Questions. Here Was My Answer.
The defamation rulings against ABC and CNN, however, are a sign of hope. The establishment media’s propaganda empire has already started crumbling in the wake of the challenge from X, which Elon Musk says is the media now. These cases should hasten that empire’s fall.
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