Doubling Down on Double Standards
If ever there was a weekend when double standards on the part of the mainstream media were on full display, the three-day weekend that was the third weekend of January 2019 proved to be just that.
First, there was the downright celebratory reaction by all sectors of the mainstream media to the Buzzfeed report that there was documented evidence that President Donald Trump instructed his former personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to congress when Cohen first appeared before congressional committees. Watching the reaction of so-called journalists and political pundits, who were absolutely giddy with the news that (finally) the nail in the President’s impeachment coffin was hammered in and that it was only a matter of time for Trump to be impeached, was a sickening albeit revealing confirmation that the once-heralded fourth estate of a free press has effectually become the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party. So egregious was the fabrication by already-discredited Buzzfeed reporters, that a spokesman for Robert Mueller’s investigative team took the unprecedented step of formally announcing that the bogus report was unsubstantiated and inaccurate on its face. Yet, the mainstream media continued the “if this was true” cacophony that impeachment was on the near horizon, nevertheless.
Then, there was the reporting surrounding the President’s Saturday announcement of a compromise offering to recalcitrant Democrats, to end the partial government shutdown by temporarily extending protections for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, as well as those escaping disaster zones, for a period of three years, in exchange for $5.9 billion in border security funding, part of which includes border wall funding. While Democrat leadership panned the proposal before it was even offered, major media outlets jumped on the “nothing new here” bandwagon, predicting its failure in the Senate as a certainty, and echoing the mantra that it is the President who is being unyielding and unreasonable.
Then there was the report that students from Covington (KY) Catholic High School, wearing “Make America Great Again” ballcaps wantonly disrespected Native Americans who were banging drums and chanting as “Indigenous Peoples” counter-protesters to the March for Life. Equating the young students wearing the ballcaps to “Nazi brown-shirts,” the mainstream media attempted to drive the narrative that it was the young Trump supporters who were inciting violence, all based on a snippet of video showing one of these students smiling in the face of a Native American drum-beater. The problem with this initial reporting was revealed when longer, more comprehensive videos showed quite the opposite. In fact, it was counter-protesters, including members of the Black Hebrew Israelites Movement and the Indigenous Peoples Marchers, who were hurling racial epithets and race-based insults at the white students. Also, it was the Native American drummers and chanters who got into the face of the students, who only responded with their school’s sports cheers in an effort to drown out the vile and racist taunts being spewed at them. Sadly, the Diocese of Covington was quick to condemn its own students before looking at the facts of what actually took place, and the school was forced to cancel today’s classes out of safety concerns for its students and faculty.
Adding insult to injury, we now are greeted with reports that freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has claimed that if her “Green” agenda is not immediately acted on and passed into law, the world would be coming to its end in a dozen years, adding that such a world which tolerates billionaires is inherently immoral. Just imagine the outrage on the part of the media if a conservative Republican made such an end-times claim based on Biblical prophecy, citing eschatological passages in the Old and New Testaments. Yet, predictably, the mainstream media reported AOC’s claims with little or no critique of her outrageous statements.
If the mainstream media did not have such double standards associated with its coverage, then they would surely have no standards at all, because far too many segments of the media have now prostituted themselves on the altars of political correctness and opposition to all things Trump.
Considering such sources, we are left with nothing more than partisan propaganda designed to achieve an intended outcome of President Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election- an obvious “plan B,” if their efforts to impeach the President before hand do not come to fruition, first.
In a word, pathetic.
-Drew Nickell, 22 January 2019
© 2019 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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