How do voters know the prestige press is hopelessly partisan?
For three weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has been refusing all requests for interviews or press conferences, and that goes unpunished. Former President Donald Trump held a press conference, and he was absolutely punished.
Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio demonstrated its ultraliberal tilt for the millionth time—at least that’s how it feels. NPR political director Domenico Montanaro organized a team to pore over Trump’s Aug. 8 press conference transcript and “found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone—and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.”
This scandalous figure had all that Glenn Kessler energy from The Washington Post. Remember when Kessler made a database that identified 30,573 “false or misleading claims” from Trump? When Joe Biden was elected, he proclaimed the database days were over. Kessler proclaimed on MSNBC, “I assume the Biden presidency will be a lot like the Obama presidency, and that they will be responsive, and will be able to quickly back up what they’re saying.”
It must have pained The Washington Post’s “fact-checker,” Glenn Kessler, when the U.S. Senate acquitted then-President Donald Trump on two articles of impeachment on Feb. 6, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The crucial word there is “assume.” Democrat journalists assume Democrats tell the truth.
This piece was eagerly shared on X by leftist die-hards, from movie star Mark Hamill to “comedian” Dean Obeidallah to MSNBC host Katie Phang.
Let’s stipulate that some of these 162 statements were inaccurate: Trump overstated his support in polls, and there’s some trolling, Trumpian braggadocio, like suggesting his crowds are bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s. But NPR broke out the usual annoying habits of Democrat-defending “checkers.”
- Trump says if he loses, “You could end up in a Depression of the 1929 variety.” That’s not a factual statement at all. That’s a prediction. It’s like all the Democrat journalists in 1992 insisting it was a lie to say Bill Clinton wouldn’t raise taxes. He did.
- Trump said Harris is “a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen.” NPR’s “fact” guy argued, “It’s debatable how liberal Harris is.” That’s not a fact-check. That’s just an emotional reaction.
- Trump said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee, is “a radical left man.” Montanaro replied, “Few, if any, reasonable people would say Walz is a ‘radical left man.’” He then claimed, without irony, that when Walz legalized pot and “protected” abortion, it wasn’t radical because it was supported by a majority of Minnesotans.
- Trump said Walz was “heavy into the transgender world.” Walz signed legislation making his state a “trans refuge” for “gender-affirming care,” but Montanaro just complained, “‘Heavy into the transgender world’ is vague and misleading.”
The lamest entry was NPR legal reporter Carrie Johnson arguing it was wrong to say former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton deleted hundreds of government emails from her private server because she was facing a subpoena for them. “The FBI said there’s no evidence the messages were deleted with a subpoena in mind.” No, they were destroyed before the subpoena. So much better.
When Biden gave a speech last month saying he wouldn’t run for reelection, NPR didn’t assemble a team to fact-check it. Montanaro offered “four takeaways.” The first takeaway compared Biden to George Washington and folded the alleged menace of Trump into words from Washington’s farewell address about how “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”
The hard-earned dollars of nonliberal taxpayers help fund NPR launching emotional ramblings over how the Democrats aren’t radicals, and they won’t ruin the economy. As often happens, “fact-checking” is actually a lot of spin control and denial.
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