President Trump is castigated for calling out “fake news” as “the enemy of the people.” Yet he is correct, and journalists reinforce Trump's view on an increasingly frequent basis.

For the Washington Post, “Democracy dies in darkness” yet for the American people, their faith and trust in media is dying, not in darkness, but in the light of day, right before our eyes.

I had the recent opportunity to watch filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s latest film, The Trayvon Hoax. Joel demonstrated a long-lost art, investigative journalism, and he did it in a fun and entertaining manner. Unlike cable news gabbers who get their talking points from echo chamber left-wing distributions networks like the former JournoList, Joel examined phone records, photos, and yearbooks. He knocked on doors and actually talked to people.

Once upon a time this would be called gumshoe journalism, walking around, investigating, putting in actual effort. Modern journalists only use their thumbs, checking Twitter and reporting tweets as verified news.

Gilbert’s film, aside from debunking the Trayvon Martin hoax, demonstrated how journalism should be done, in contrast to the shoddy reporting that now passes for journalism. This hoax was relatively small in scale, including creating a false witness to testify against George Zimmerman, but the implications of this hoax were huge and continue to this day, long after the 2012 shooting.

The Trayvon hoax spawned racial strife on a scale not seen in decades. From “hands up don’t shoot,” to the Ferguson effect of police backing away from traditional policing activities, to the detriment of poor and minority neighborhoods. We were treated to Freddie Gray, Jussie Smollett, and kneeling professional athletes. Political careers were born after the Trayvon hoax including attorney Benjamin Crump and the almost-governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum, just as the Tawana Brawley hoax thrust Al Sharpton onto the national stage several decades ago.

Big media played its part in the Trayvon hoax as in NBC doctoring George Zimmerman’s 911 call to make Zimmerman appear a racist, providing a racial angle for his self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin. CNN referred to Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” to keep the race angle front and center. Did they ever refer to Barack Obama as “half black” given the white skin color of his mother?

Are these hoaxes accidental or deliberate? Is this sloppy reporting or an attempt to shape a narrative rather than simply report the news? I’ll report, you decide, as Fox News now says.

A few days ago, "ABC World News Tonight" aired video described as a Turkish attack in Syria. ABC News Anchor Tom Llamas said on air,

This video, right here, appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town.

The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS, now horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies.

This is more of the “Orange Man Bad” filter through which virtually every news report is presented. The incompetent president is creating chaos in the Middle East by removing a handful of troops from Syria. ABC was mum when, “President Obama ignored general's pleas to keep American military forces in Iraq.”

That last bit is hypocrisy, not a hoax, holding Democrats and Republicans to far different standards. Instead the hoax is that the video was not of the Turkish military, as reported by ABC, but instead a, “military gun shoot” at a Kentucky gun range. Doubling down, “ABC foreign correspondent Ian Pannell repeats Llamas’ claim of the footage’s authenticity.”

This isn’t a simple mistake. The video was from a 2017 YouTube posting called, “Knob Creek machine gun shoot 2016.” This was deliberate, a hoax, an attempt to further a particular narrative. Once caught, ABC will “regret the error,” yet in reality their only regret is getting caught.

There are other hoaxes which perpetuate social or economic justice causes. The Book of Matt debunked numerous falsehoods surrounding the murder of Matthew Sheppard. Honest climate scientists are calling out the hoax of catastrophic man-made global warning with research articles like this one, “No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change.” The climate hoax is costing taxpayers untold billions in useless climate initiatives and legislation. And journalists happily play along, perpetuating the hoaxes.

Obama and his minions blamed the Benghazi embassy attack on a YouTube video and the media played along with the hoax like useful idiots. Trump’s 2016 election victory over “the smartest woman in the world” was blamed on Russian interference and collusion. This story was promoted by the media and their Democratic Party comrades endlessly for two years until Robert Mueller’s investigation reluctantly debunked what the hoaxers had been telling us daily.

Now it’s on to Ukraine, with the media creating an elaborate ruse with the help of reps Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, and Nancy Pelosi. They report Trump said things to the Ukrainian president that are contradicted by the transcript of the call and the statements of the two participants on the call. But it’s the narrative and the hoax, not the truth that matters.

Speaker Pelosi just announced no vote to authorize a Trump impeachment inquiry but the hoax will continue. Rep. Schiff’s Intelligence Committee can conveniently hold hearings behind closed doors, under the guise of “secret intelligence hearings,” exclude Republicans from the process, leak selective and misleading bits to the media, then sit back as the media perpetuates the hoax that the president is about to be impeached, that once again, “The walls are closing in on Trump” as they have been since he took the oath of office three years ago.

A few honest journalists boldly go where CNN and the New York Times are uninterested or afraid to go. It’s left to these few brave journalists -- Joel Gilbert, Sara Carter, John Solomon, Brian Cates, to name a few – to do the heavy lifting of actual investigative reporting, as Joel Gilbert did in debunking the hoax of Barack Obama’s life story through his film, Dreams from my Real Father.

Instead, journalism has been replaced by fiction writing, so-called reporters parroting partisan talking points, deliberately doctoring audio and video, ignoring inconvenient facts and contradictions, all to push a political narrative. It is, to borrow a line from FBI hoaxer James Comey, their “higher calling” to thwart the will of the people in favor of their preferences as to who leads our country.

Just like Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy, modern journalism is dead. They just don’t know it yet.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a Denver based physician, freelance writer and occasional radio talk show host whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, Twitter, and QuodVerum.