Bozell & Graham Column: Trump's Right, The Media's Rigged

October 18th, 2016 10:39 PM

On his CNN show Reliable Sources on October 16, host Brian Stelter took the denial of liberal media bias to a new level. In the wake of hundreds of emails underlining media-Democrat collusion, he insisted that every American should deny the evidence.

“In Trump's world, journalists are really just Clinton campaign workers in disguise collaborating with her in an attempt to rig the election. This is not just false, it's ludicrous and it's damaging.”

On what planet does this man live? Even by Clinton News Network standards this is ridiculous.

A charge of leftist media bias this election cycle is about as ludicrous as claiming the sun rises in the east. All these WikiLeaks emails give first-hand evidence of the so-called "objective" press acting like badly disguised Clinton campaign workers. If this sort of fraud were illegal, these reporters would be headed for Sing Sing.

What’s false, ludicrous, and damaging to democracy is the idea that this sort of journalistic betrayal is ethical and permissible.

Start with this: How can a CNN host so blithely dismiss the compromise of a CNN town hall between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders when Donna Brazile – CNN pundit as well as professional Democrat – is feeding an actual question ahead of a debate to the Clinton campaign? It doesn’t matter whether Brazile grabbed the question from CNN or its partner, the black-oriented cable network TV One. She was a CNN contributor, rigging a CNN event.

CNN’s Jake Tapper called this Brazile scandal journalistically “horrifying.” Apparently Stelter thinks his colleague Tapper is “false, ludicrous, and damaging.”

If Corey Lewandowski was feeding CNN town-hall questions to Donald Trump, we can guess Stelter would have a heart attack on air.

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan agreed on Stelter’s show that this whole liberal-conspiracy theory was “absurd.” She said “Nobody is sitting in a room with each other and planning to, you know, do anything evil to a candidate.” So what do you call the Washington Post publishing the Trump sex-talk-tape in six hours when they sat on the Paula Jones story for months? What’s absurd is denying that liberal bias is in full corrosive effect.

What the Wikileaks email trove is exposing is how reporters individually pandered and plotted and manipulated Hillary Clinton’s media coverage. They were at Hillary’s beck and call. Unsurprisingly, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos harshly interviewed author Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer on April 26, 2015. In an e-mail, Clinton campaign staffer Jesse Ferguson boasted George was a perfect servant:  “Great work everyone. This interview is perfect. He [Schweizer] lands nothing and everything is refuted (mostly based on our work).”

New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich was allowing Clinton communications director Jen Palmieri to pick and choose which Hillary quotes she would like him to use in a July article, and which to bury. Palmieri listed her vetoes, then imperiously announced: “Let me know if that is not clear. Working from an iPhone on the plane so am not able to access the transcript to cut and paste.”

Why would anyone try to suggest that treating reporters like drive-in carhops on roller skates is professional journalism in action? Why would they deny the irrefutably obvious?

There’s an easy guess.  Because Wikileaks is exposing the media-Democrat collusion that is utterly routine in every election cycle. The Brian Stelters don’t want to admit there’s anything sleazy about this. Are they doing their part to rig the elections  to favor the Democrats? Of course they are.  Lord knows we don't want those poor, uneducated and easy-to-command types to carry the day, do we?