When speaking to students in an economics or political philosophy class, I often try to lever a contemporary news story to let us jump into a larger principle or cache of historical evidence revealing important truths.
Friday, October 25, we ALL were blessed with another such story. It’s a laughable flash of petulance that some Americans might see as relatively insignificant (given the nearly non-existent circulation of dinosaur “news” outlets and the increasing distrust of news consumers who encounter such fossils), but it actually opens a window on something the Media Research Center long has been fighting:
On Friday, Washington Post Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan (the husband of ever-charming former “diplomat” and Ukraine-meddler Victoria Nuland) resigned from his royal post at the Post, expressing in apocalyptic terms his anger over the fact that WaPo owner Jeff Bezos elected to not have the paper endorse any presidential candidate this time ‘round.
As Isaac Schorr wrote for Mediaite:
"Washington Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned on Friday over the newspaper’s decision not to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.”
That’s right. It was not the idea of remaining neutral – something that, according to reports, came from Bezos,and a move which many people might applaud – it was the fact that Bezos’ position prevented the WaPo from endorsing Kagan’s favorite free-speech-hater: Kamala Harris.
Curiously, Benzinga’s Bibhu Patnaik (assisted by AI, as acknowledged at the bottom of Patnaik’s piece) claims that this move runs counter to the WaPo’s “tradition.”
Yet, when announcing the decision Friday, WaPo Publisher and CEO William Lewis reminded readers that the paper remained neutral in both the 1960 and 1972 Presidential contests.
One wonders, then, if it was Bibhu Patnaik or the Artificial Intelligence or both that were not interested in Lewis’ historical points.
And one might speculate as to whether Lewis and Bezos took this position in order to give their left-biased “reporters” some cover, allowing the big-wigs and supporters of the leftist rag to claim, “Look – just LOOK – at the Editorial Board and overall position of the paper! They’re NEUTRAL!”
Yes, it’s laughable. Yes, it has been exposed as laughable by the Media Research Center. In fact, a non-Bezos paper, the New York Post (which actually had the courage to publish the facts about the Hunter Biden laptop when pop media were falsely claiming it had no chain of custody and was part of a “Russian” psy-op against Biden) recently cited the MRC study indicating that such notoriously leftist publications as the WaPO, Politico, and the New York Times favored Harris in their so-called journalism.
But, regardless of one’s suspicions of Bezos’ motivations for this return to neutrality, the Kagan explosion and expostulations offer some profound lessons in hypocrisy.
Mediaite’s Schorr writes:
“In November 2023, he (Kagan) published an expansive column in the Post under the headline ‘A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.’”
So, Mr. Kagan, who, evidently, supports Harris, thinks that only Trump represents a titanic threat to the limitations to central government power that are outlined in the US Constitution?
He focuses solely on Trump as a threat?
Certainly, Mr. Trump disregarded his constitutional oath and our rights when he unconstitutionally announced a so-called “medical emergency” in March of 2020 for something that no one can positively say was a real pandemic (since Trump’s own administration subsidized the inflation of COVID-19 death reports). Certainly, Mr. Trump insulted the Constitution by claiming he backed so-called “Red Flag Laws” and saying, “We take the guns and to the due process later.” And there are many other actions and statements one can cite that show Mr. Trump’s egregious departures from his constitutional oath and from fundamental ethics.
But Harris and Biden have backed all of those errors and more. Harris worked for a man who instituted border-blocks for truckers who did not conform to his unconstitutional federal mRNA jab diktat. She worked for a man who was Vice-President when Barack Obama tried to use the Espionage Act against more whistleblowers and journalists than all previous US Presidents combined, going back to the origin of the act in World War One.
In fact, Harris’ brand of fascism was on display just last month, when she told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media sites that don’t conform to her idea of truth should be shut down.
Yet Kagan focuses only on Trump, and does so with the myopia of a hardcore collectivist who seems to think that gang rule over individuals is both beneficial and the governing framework for the US envisioned by the Founders.
Related: Washington Post Refuses to Endorse Anyone For the First Time Since 1988
Time to trot out the tired leftist fantasy, the “democracy” canard…
“’If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office,’ wrote Kagan at the time, lamenting that ‘we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy.’”
It's so childish as to be nearly insufferable. In covering Kagan’s latest petulant explosion and those of other journalists and left-loving political hacks, journalist Glenn Greenwald put it well, saying:
“Where would this idea come from that it’s somehow courageous to endorse Kamala Harris and cowardly not to? And, yes, newspapers are supposed to hold the powerful to account. Right now the powerful are the people occupying the White House. That’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And what they’re (the establishment left media) angry about isn’t the Washington Post’s failure to hold Kamala Harris to account. They’re angry at the Washington Post’s refusal to cheerlead for Kamala Harris, openly, explicitly, because that is what their actual expectation of media outlets is: not to inform the world, not to do reporting, not to hold powerful people accountable, but to do everything possible to help the Democrat Party win.”
And while the WaPo whiners like Kagan rage supreme (even author Stephen King announced that he was canceling his five-year-long subscription to the paper -- inspiring many to wonder how he could waste that cash for so long, and inspiring others to ask if he will be consistent and push to have his books removed from Bezos' Amazon), the weekend also saw defections from the Los Angeles Times, where, subsequent to Friday’s announcement by owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong that the paper would not endorse a candidate for the fist time since 2008, three members of the board resigned, and speculation arose as to whether Soon-Shiong had taken that neutral position because his daughter had stressed the double-standard of a journalistic outlet backing a woman such as Harris, whose administration has armed Israel – with arms used to kill hundreds of journalists in Gaza since October of last year.
Dr. Soon-Shiong denies that such a reality was his reason for remaining neutral, but his position does not hide the fact that many journalists in leftist circles seem completely comfortable backing Harris, despite her dark and unconstitutional track record.
Thus, the coast-to-coasts uproar over neutrality tells media watchdogs a great deal, and lends credence to the idea that it’s wise to hold many of the dinosaur “journalists” in contempt and watch for their absolutely shameful hypocrisy.
As independent reporters write and stream about important events and the threats to liberty, we can find the trustworthy figures and disregard the unscrupulous.
Given how poorly the dinosaur outlets like Kagan’s old WaPo are performing, that trend already has begun.
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Faux Governor of Georgia Stacey Abrams blames sexism and racism for black men who don’t support Kamala Harris. https://t.co/KoJs7WUOPQ
— MRCTV (@mrctv) October 28, 2024