Of noble duty shirked

During an edition of his podcast, professor, attorney, and author Alan Dershowitz waxed acidic: "The newspapers say, 'Oh my God, we're so worried the Supreme Court may take away our right to free speech and deny us the protection of malice!'

"You have frittered away the trust of the American public," he then charged. "Your Trump Derangement Syndrome has so influenced and affected the way you're reporting, it's deserving of nothing but great contempt!"

The famed barrister's brickbat was of a piece with President Trump's dismissal of legacy press venues as "enemies of the American people."

Those dubious of such critiques should ask themselves how many of the following, widely disseminated press falsehoods they've encountered:

Biden was "sharp" / Trump-Russian collusion / Jussie Smollet 'hate crime' / Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation / Musk nazi-salute hoax / "very fine people" / Hands up, don't shoot / Trump trashes troops as "suckers and losers" / policemen were killed on J6 / ICE on horseback whipping illegals / Trump grabbed Beast's steering wheel / Trump advised drinking bleach / "bloodbath" threat. 

(A record of those and many more examples of media deceits was compiled by Breitbart's John Nolte.)

When reporters confront officials, they ideally represent us, and ask probing questions on our behalf. Questions whose full, honest answers we who would direct government must have.

To whatever extent that laudable model might once have been reality, though, it has in recent decades been strangled. Trumpeting of the supposed superiority of authoritarian elites has become the media standard.

Since the populist MAGA Revolution first threatened status quo sensibilities, its patriotic adherents have been ridiculed as unlettered, oafish, and detrimental to refined society. Toward that scurrilous end, reporters, on-air talking heads, editors, columnists, producers, analysts, and even cartoonists were pressed into monotonously impious service.

Dodgy news partisans sometimes portray themselves in the revered tradition of storied muckrakers. Beaming with self-congratulation, they hail theirs as an endeavor without whose hawk-eyed watchfulness and unflinching analyses the public would fall prey to bureaucratic and commercial manipulations.

Stirring indeed are romantic tales of dogged reporters rope-swinging into darkened-windows planning lairs of swinish barons of high finance and unscrupulous agents of dominion. And of an ethically unimpeachable investigative press ripping away pretenses of propriety, bravely speaking truth to power, and advocating for rank-and-file citizens who would otherwise lack meaningful access to ensconced prominence.

Don't be mislead by such mawkish fancy spinning. Inky dirt-doers have a mission, and it is not objective reporting. They promulgate slants, deceptively incomplete renditions, and even shouted deceits, so that partisan predominance and the crushing of opposing factions be realized, and that unnatural cultural deviances be championed.

Print and electronic outlets miss no opportunity to smear the popular movement, headed by President Trump, to wrest back control of America from backstairs overlords who desire its recreation as an effete component of grim globalist machinery. 

Regular assaults on Trump and his average-citizen base are effected in manners sometimes insidious, but in other episodes, jarringly bold. But regardless of visibility or volume, the clear message is that the desires of elites alone should determine our shared future. The well-being and wishes of rank-and-file Americans are of less import than the ideological fancies of upper-crust popinjays in gated demenses.

Cushion-chaired media poohbahs and bylined perpetrators do not share average Americans' values. They promote a reptilian ideology of control. 

We the people are waved away by newsroom-perched bigots who reek of elitist prejudice. We are falsely classed as racists, sexists, xenophobes, or whatever other lurid sobriquet might be handy.

In order to best chart our country's course, citizens require objective accounting of essential information. Our effective participation in the political process is sabotaged by skewed reportage and commentary. 

Rather than penning high-hat editorials, mainstream scribes, who are not honest enough to report frauds and abuses perpetrated by their pinky-raised fellows, should hang low their heads. 

President Trump and Professor Dershowitz were bang on.