What If We Had A Functional Media?

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

Could you imagine the difference if, in the fall of 2020, the Washington Post had accepted a copy of the Hunter Biden hard drive and actually investigated the thousands of emails, photos, text messages, and other evidence that implicated not just Hunter but his father Joe Biden in sundry unethical and criminal enterprises?

What about CBS, NBC, and ABC?

Shouldn’t we as news consumers expect these leviathans “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved,” as the new owner of the New York Times declared way back in 1896?

Yet in October 2020, when the New York Post wrote a series of stories describing the corrupt nature of the Biden family as exposed by the Hunter Biden laptop, there were few mainstream media outlets that dared to follow.

Or really, not dared, but chose. Because there is nothing daring about doing your job correctly.

You would think that when all the major social media companies like Facebook and Twitter blocked any discussion of the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop, these other major news corporations would have come to the aid of the Post.

If any of them had done their own investigation of the laptop, do you think that Twitter could have continued to censor the news under the false claim that it was Russian disinformation? Hardly.

But no mainstream media outlets were willing to put their own reputations on the line to support free speech – because their reputations are based entirely on being guardians of the left, and protecting Hillary, Barack and the Bidens is more important than fidelity to any chimeric sense of fairness and honor.

And Hunter Biden’s laptop is just a symptom.

In instance after instance, most of the media either closes its eyes to stories that implicate liberals or Democrats in unethical or illegal behavior, or pretends they are of no importance. Examples abound, from the whitewashing of Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the invention of the Russia collusion hoax to the complete lack of curiosity about the sweetheart deal offered to Hunter Biden by the so-called independent Justice Department.

It’s no wonder that much of the public at large is convinced there is no evidence that warrants the impeachment of Joe Biden for bribery or treason.

That’s what happens when you depend on biased news sources to form your opinion.

And what’s worse: These are not just biased news sources, but ignorant ones. Take, for example, the case of Philip Bump of the Washington Post.

Bump, a prized columnist and news analyst, was recently embarrassed by podcast host Noam Dworman, who is best known as the owner of a New York City comedy club. Bump claimed there was no evidence that President Biden had done anything improper in regard to his son’s business deals with foreign adversaries, and when Dworman rattled off some of the most important evidence suggesting otherwise, Bump took off his headset and walked away.

The interview ended when Dworman asked Bump: “What do you take from [Hunter’s] text message to his adult daughter — Hunter texted her, “I had to give 50% of my income to Pop.”

Bump, the Washington insider who molds public opinion by telling the rest of us what to think, declared meekly, “I have no idea what that means. I don’t. I have no idea what that means.”

And let’s be clear.

He doesn’t want to know what it means. That’s because he is not a real journalist; he is a propagandist for Democratic officials, ideas, and policies.

Most importantly, it is when Dworman challenged Bump to acknowledge what a real journalist would do – ask questions of Hunter Biden’s daughter to get to the bottom of the story – that the columnist walked out.

DWORMAN: Has anybody asked her?

BUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know!

DWORMAN: Don’t you think somebody should ask her?

Hell no, because then the mainstream media would be serving the American public instead of Joe Biden. Perhaps even more nefariously than what it has done to protect the Bidens, the media has fed the public with a steady stream of lies about Donald Trump. Most relevant today, as the former president faces 91 felony counts and four indictments, is the insistent drumbeat of claims that Trump led an insurrection against the federal government or that he knowingly lied about election fraud.

Again, just like with the Hunter Biden laptop, the average citizen is supposed to sheepishly accept the dismissive reporting of the media about election irregularities as the unadulterated truth, and any deviation from that narrative is met with silence or scorn.

We have a perfect example of that in the investigative reporting of the Gateway Pundit last month that revealed extensive election fraud in Michigan during the 2020 election. If you are scratching your head, and asking what the heck I’m talking about, then it’s because you have fallen victim to the media’s refusal to cover any news that reflects positively on President Trump.

Chances are, you have never even heard of the Gateway Pundit unless you are a dedicated conservative who has sought out alternative sources of news that counter the mainstream narrative. Anyone else would probably be scared away by the public assessments of such left-wing institutions as Wikipedia, which calls the Gateway Pundit “an American far-right fake news website…. known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.”

But if you want to know the facts about a police investigation that started in October 2020 and found that more than 10,000 mostly fake voter registrations were submitted to election officials in Muskegon County, Michigan, you would need to read the Gateway Pundit, or one of the conservative websites that picked up their stories. Because there is no way that the New York Times or NBC will ever report on this explosive story.

And it doesn’t matter whether the Gateway Pundit is a conservative advocacy website or not.

True, the website doesn’t have journalistic credentials, but who cares?

Journalism as an institution is in total disrepair. No one cares about credentials; we care about credibility. What matters is the evidence the website’s reporters provide to substantiate their claims that a pattern of election fraud in Michigan and other states was discovered prior to the 2020 election and then covered up after the election. And there is plenty of evidence. Most importantly, the Gateway Pundit’s reporters obtained the Michigan State Police report that detailed an extensive preliminary investigation found credible evidence of a scheme to create fake voters.

In many ways, the oppression of the Muskegon election interference story parallels the techniques used to oppress the New York Post’s laptop story. If you do a Google search for “Muskegon voter registration police report” (without the quotes) you will see an interesting pattern.

First, the blacklisting of Gateway Pundit from the Google results. Second, the utter silence of the elite media on this hugely significant story. Third, a number of so-called “fact checks” that downplay the veracity of the story. The only thing missing is a letter from 51 intelligence agents calling the whole thing a “Russian information operation.”

The closest we ever got to a mainstream news acknowledgment of the Gateway Pundit’s reporting was when the Detroit News ran a shocking admission from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office that the facts of the story were accurate and that the election fraud was reported to the FBI:

Nessel’s press secretary, Danny Wimmer, said the total number of suspected fraudulent forms delivered to the Muskegon clerk by the individual was 8,000 to 10,000 ahead of the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election.

‘The city clerk in Muskegon detected the fraudulent material provided and alerted the proper authorities,’ Wimmer said in a statement. ‘A thorough investigation was conducted by multiple agencies within the state and no successful fraud was perpetrated upon the state’s election process or qualified voter file.’

In other words, because the 10,000 fake registrations were detected by an alert election official, there was nothing to worry about. Huh?

First of all, attempted election fraud on that scale should worry us all, but more importantly, there is no reason to think that all the election fraud was caught just because one election scammer was caught one time.

The Michigan State Police report on the investigation was extensively redacted, but on page 14, the authorities failed to redact the name of GBI Strategies, a Democrat-aligned election-turnout specialist that has been confirmed as having 2020 operations in multiple states. The office of GBI Strategies that was searched under a warrant turned up as many as 19 vehicles used by the company’s workers, certainly more than one lone worker would need. In addition, the woman who tried to submit more than 10,000 fake registrations told state police that she had “done work” in Detroit, Ypsilanti, Southfield, Flint, and Lansing as well as Muskegon.

Despite Nessel’s celebration of how 10,000 fake registrations were detected by an alert election clerk, there is absolutely no reason to believe that thousands of fake registrations were also uncovered in those other cities where GBI Strategies was hard at work. Conclusion? Joe Biden’s victory by 154,000 votes in the Great Lakes State may have been less great than we were led to believe. In fact, it may not have been a victory at all. The only way to find out would be to demand a forensic audit of voter registrations submitted in the month or two prior to the election.

But that will never happen if the only voice demanding it is the Gateway Pundit. Because just as there was a concerted campaign to discredit the New York Post when it revealed the extent of the corruption in the Biden family as exposed on Hunter’s laptop, there has been an equally dishonest campaign to discredit the Gateway Pundit.

Although you won’t find one story published by the Gateway Pundit when you look at the top 100 results of a Google search for the Muskegon police report on election fraud, you will not surprisingly find three “fact checks” claiming the story is fake news. Politifact, Lead Stories, and Newsweek all managed to find their way into the top 100 search results to debunk a story that Google was pretending didn’t even exist.

Each of these “fact checks” followed the same pattern. They repeated the evidence in the Michigan State Police report that the Gateway Pundit based its reporting on, and then they said “It doesn’t matter” because the state attorney general said no fraud occurred. Really? That’s what we call a fact check these days?

How about this? Let’s get the New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post and NBC to assign their best investigative reporters to comb through voter registration records in Michigan. Why not track down the CEO of GBI Strategies and question him about what techniques the company uses to increase voter turnout, which states they operated in during the 2020 election, and what relationship exists between GBI Strategies and the Democratic Party or the Biden campaign?

But that will never happen, which is why the Gateway Pundit and similar citizen journalist organizations are necessary. They may not be perfect, but they provide a service we can’t get from most media outlets today  – they aren’t a mouthpiece for the official narrative being sold to us by the Deep State, the Democratic Party, and the donor class.

And until the mainstream media rediscovers the value of reporting the news “without fear or favor,” I’ll rely on the Gateway Pundit, Breitbart News, and Citizen Free Press to provide the news the powers that be don’t want me to know.