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Imagine a neurological disease that changed your perceptions in subtle, damaging ways.
Stubbing your toe would bring pleasure. Rotten meat would taste delicious. Deadly cold would feel comfy.
Meanwhile, a gentle neck massage would make you feel sick, and fresh food would taste disgusting.
You wouldn’t last long with such a disease. But our society is facing something similar.
The news media, which are supposed to act as a sort of nervous system for the body politic, instead give us misinformation.
The national equivalent of stubbed toes and rotten meat gets media praise and approval, while healthy things are treated as vile and wrong.
The latest example comes from Saturday’s much-diminished annual dinner of the much-diminished White House Correspondents’ Association, whose self-appointed members meet annually to give themselves awards and congratulate themselves on their brave truth-telling.
This year went badly.
The WHCA dinner, which DC journalists call their “nerd prom,” once featured famous comedians as headliners.
Presidents would reliably attend and put up with being “roasted” — usually more harshly for the Republican ones than for Democrats — as part of a Washington ritual.
It was important to look like a good sport, so that the press would think well of you.
But this year, there were no comedians, no president, and not even much in the way of senior administration officials or important members of Congress.
The poor DC press corps has reached that Washington nadir of not being worth sucking up to.
Given their penchant for calling Trump Hitler and smearing his aides and supporters as Nazis, trying to come off as nice guys probably seemed pointless anyway.
Celebrities, too, were missing. Last year, the journalists got to mingle with Scarlett Johansson, Colin Jost, Chris Hemsworth, Rachel Brosnahan, Keri Russell, and Rufus Sewell.
This year, the stars stayed away. Nobody knows better than Hollywood when you’re a loser, and nobody shuns losers harder than Hollywood.
So instead we got two things from this year’s event: Lame self-justification and, mirabile dictu, a small measure of actual accountability for massive media failure.
It came in regard to the legacy media’s utterly deliberate effort to prop up Joe Biden’s leaderless presidential administration, and then to transfer its propping-up services to Kamala Harris’ hapless presidential campaign.
WHCA President Eugene Daniels tried to put a good face on things.
“We’ve been tested, attacked, but every single day our members get up, they run to the White House, plane, train, automobile with one mission: holding the powerful accountable,” he said.
Well, that certainly wasn’t their role under Biden.
In 2020, the legacy media buried the Hunter Biden laptop story, joining the Biden campaign’s knowingly and obviously false claims that The Post’s reporting was “Russian disinformation.”
It boosted the Biden operation’s basement strategy that kept Joe campaigning by Zoom — allegedly for COVID reasons but actually because, as was already plain, he was mentally incapable of doing otherwise.
The press covered for Biden when, unlike normal presidents, he was kept tightly controlled and scripted.
Reporters who asked questions at his rare press conferences were picked in advance, and Biden read off his answers from pre-printed cards featuring their photos.
This was no secret to the legacy media members, but they didn’t tell Americans.
In fact, when Republicans released videos of Biden acting senile and clueless, the White House press corps joined Democratic flacks to call them “cheap fakes” — when in fact, as we’ve all seen since, the clips accurately displayed Biden’s infirmities.
Now that the election is over, those same reporters are trying to act as if they were deceived.
Several, notably CNN’s Jake Tapper, are publishing exposés of how the fraud was maintained, as if they didn’t know all along.
At Saturday’s dinner, Axios correspondent Alex Thompson made a show of lighting into the Biden administration for maintaining the fiction, and his fellow journalists for buying it.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said.
“Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves,” he continued. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story . . . We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”
But journalists didn’t “miss” the story. They lied about it.
They chose not to cover what Americans could see with their own eyes.
And they did so for political reasons: to help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
Then, when Biden was obviously toast, they pivoted to claims that the formerly hopeless Harris was presidential timber, as well as “joyful” and “brat.” Puhleez.
A healthy country’s political nervous system would tell us when our president is mentally incompetent. Instead, we had one that smothered the truth.
It should hurt when you stub your toe. And this toe-stubbing should be painful for the political press.
Maybe then they’ll learn something.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
English (US)