A Media Guide

One of the problems with blatant media bias is that after a while, you become used to it. And that's more dangerous and destructive than the bias itself. If bias becomes the norm (and it has), trust in media vanishes (it has) and trust in government is eroded because people expect fake news and have trouble assessing what is real and what is fabricated. Sure, it's possible to ferret out the real news, but it takes effort and time. The majority of people don't seem to want to expend either.

The editors of Issues & Insights provide a handy guide that describes the media bias playbook, using the latest Biden scandal as an example. They write:

Those of us who’ve been around awhile have come to notice a similar pattern when it comes to every other scandal involving Democrats. So here, as a reader service, is a handy media guide to how the press covers — or more appropriately, covers up — Democratic scandals.

1. Ignore the story as long as possible. The first step in reporting a Democratic scandal is to not cover it at all. Keep it contained among bloggers and the conservative press in hopes that it doesn’t go anywhere ...

2. Devote minimal resources to covering it. When ignoring the story isn’t a possibility, devote minimal resources to it. By all means, don’t assign investigative reporters to cover it, lest they dig up something else ...

3. Focus on the denials. The first story in Politico about the Post story was “Biden campaign lashes out at the New York Post.” The Times’ headline was “Allegation on Biden Prompts Pushback From Social Media Companies.”

4. Attack the messenger. In the case of the Post story, mainstream news outlets were more interested in trashing Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani than in determining the veracity of the emails he was revealing, claiming he was a stooge spreading Russian disinformation ...

5. Play up doubts. Rather than chase down the facts of the scandal, the New York Times sent reporters to investigate the Post. The result was a story headlined “New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts.”

6. Cast it in a partisan light. If a scandal involves a Democrat, the press can always be counted on to dismiss it as part of some Republican strategy to distract voters from the important issues.   

7. Set an incredibly high bar for what constitutes wrongdoing. If nothing else, the Hunter emails suggest that Joe Biden flat out lied when he claimed he’d had nothing to do with Hunter’s business dealings. Yet while the press keeps track of every utterance of Trump’s that it can claim to be untrue, Biden’s apparent flagrant and self-serving lie is treated as a nothingburger.

8. Do the opposite of No. 7 if the scandal involves a Republican.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: If it weren’t for double standards, the mainstream media would have no standards at all.

Going forward, conservatives must now treat the media as a systemic constraint. The trained hamsters will not change and likely, will only get more biased, more dishonest and more partisan. They cannot and should not be trusted. They truly are the enemy of an honest and open democracy.

UPDATE-1:

The current protestation of the Democrat's trained hamsters in the media is that the Biden scandal is "unverifiable" and therefore, not worthy of investigation (after their claim that Russian "disinformation" disintegrated and their laughable argument that Hunter Biden's "addiction" put the entire affair off-limits). In essence, they're saying, "Nothing to see here, move along." 

Forgetting that the role of an honest media is to investigate substantive allegations of wrongdoing in order to verify them, much of the Biden scandal is "verifiable" using publicly available sources. The media simply needs to look. They won't.

The second protestation is that all information about the scandal is coming from conservative or right-leaning sources, but since left leaning media (i.e., 95 percent of all media) refuses to investigate the scandal or write about it, where else could it possibly come from?

One such source is a comprehensive 60-page report (with well over 200 (!) citations to support its findings) that provides an in-depth look at the all-too-typical manner in which those within the Washington swamp become rich. In the report, the Bidens (Hunter is hardly the only Biden involved in this, although he, along with Joe Biden, is up-to-his eyeballs in influence peddling for profit) have troubling associations with a variety of Chinese SOEs (state-owned entities), many connected with the Chinese Communist Party's intelligence and military arms, not to mention sketchy dealing with the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. A quick summary can be found here.

I'm under no illusion that any of this will affect the outcome of the election. The story is complicated, allowing the swamp creatures to hide in plain sight. The media will do everything possible to stonewall the story, much as they did repeatedly for the myriad serious scandals (e.g., the IRS scandal, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, the VA scandal) that occurred during the Obama-Biden administration. Same old, same old.

UPDATE-2:

To their credit, a few left-leaning journalists are stepping up and castigating the mainstream and social media for their concerted effort to censor the Biden scandal. Matt Taibbi writes:

The incredible decision by Twitter and Facebook to block access to a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter going so far as to lock the 200 year-old newspaper out of its own account for over a week, continues to be a major underreported scandal.

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. Imagine the reaction if that same set of facts involved the New York Times and any of its multitudinous unverifiable “exposes” from the last half-decade: from the similarly-leaked “black ledger” story implicating Paul Manafort, to its later-debunked “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story, to its mountain of articles about the far more dubious Steele dossier. Internet platforms for years have balked at intervening at many other sensational “unverified” stories, including ones called into question in very short order

The flow of information in the United States has become so politicized – bottlenecked by an increasingly brazen union of corporate press and tech platforms – that it’s become impossible for American audiences to see news about certain topics absent thickets of propagandistic contextualizing. Try to look up anything about Burisma, Joe Biden, or Hunter Biden in English, however, and you’re likely to be shown a pile of “fact-checks” and explainers ahead of the raw information:

Other true information has been scrubbed or de-ranked, either by platforms or by a confederation of press outlets whose loyalty to the Democratic Party far now overshadows its obligations to inform.

In a way, it's fascinating. Driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome, the obvious and blatant bias of the media become apparent. As I noted in the body of this post, they have become "the enemy of an honest and open democracy." Then again, given their predisposition for leftist ideology, maybe that's exactly what they want.