We hear it all the time and it’s true: “How would the liberal media be treating this story if it was a Republican instead of a Democrat?”

• The IRS whistleblowers in the Hunter Biden matter are ignored by the liberal media.
• Biden steals thousands of classified documents -- without the authority to declassify them -- when he was a senator and vice-president and the story disappears.
• FBI insiders bravely reveal the blatant pro-Democrat bias of the organization and their testimony is sloughed off.
• Joe Biden commits one embarrassing verbal gaffe after another, demonstrating an unarguable diminution of mental acuity, and the video clips are nowhere to be seen on the mainstream stations.
• James Comer finds one ironclad, tangible example after another of inappropriate, even illegal, financial dealings by the entire Biden family and Comer’s investigation is dismissed by the liberal media as unfounded hearsay.
• Talk of the 2016 presidential election being stolen by President Trump from Hillary is hailed as heroic, patriotic protest, but presenting the mountains of indisputable evidence of 2020 election fraud committed by the Democrats against President Trump gets you branded as a traitor by the mainstream media.

This list of examples could go on and on, but for the sake of brevity and current relevance, we’ll leave it there. The mainstream media is totally biased in favor of the Democrats. The networks, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, late-night television, the major newspapers, and PBS are all vessels of liberal thought. The editors and correspondents at these organizations actively promote liberal positions and intentionally cast anything conservative in a negative light, especially if it has anything even remotely to do with President Trump.

None of this is new. It’s been going on for quite a while. Some people say that the specific event where the media turned and became liberally biased was in June 1987. This was when the painfully unintellectual Democrat bomb-thrower Ted Kennedy -- desperately seeking some small measure of self-justification after a disappointing political career totally bereft of any significant accomplishments whatsoever -- took to the Senate floor and tore into President Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork with a totally unfounded, hateful, cliché-ridden screed attacking his character and his qualifications. It was all false, but the networks jumped on it and replayed it endlessly, until even the average casually attentive voter had a negative opinion of Bork’s nomination and he was defeated.

The bigger issue is can anything be done to change the liberal media’s behavior. That’s the question. So far, the answer has been “no.”

There is a conservative organization called the Media Research Center that bills itself as “America’s Media Watchdog.” They are a good organization that does a lot of very valuable work. By far their biggest contribution to the news/media environment is the research and record-keeping functions they perform. They maintain innumerable (probably in the millions) files of media occurrences dating back decades and they are constantly monitoring the news and chronicling the coverage. When you see a report on TV that the “coverage of President Trump a month before the election was 91% negative” or that the “major networks devoted only 53 seconds of coverage to the Hunter laptop story,” chances are that was the MRC at work.

But unfortunately, The MRC is an after-the-fact “Ah ha!” organization. They do a great job of reporting and detailing out exactly what crimes the liberal media have committed, after they’ve already committed them. They will not and cannot go after the liberal media and get them to change their behavior before their next Kennedyesque transgression. So we are left with the Joy Reids, Jake Tappers, Joy Behars, and Jim Acostas continually spewing their insulting, tilted lies, totally uninhibited by any thought of being called to account for their behavior.

The key to behavior modification is negative, painful consequences. If the subject experiences a painful rebuke on a repeated basis, they learn to not continue that behavior. If a dog messes in the house and is met with a rolled-up magazine across the snoot every time, it soon learns not to mess in the house. If a lab rat is given the choice of getting a food pellet from two dispensers, one of which gives out a sharp electrical shock, the rat will learn in very short order not to use that dispenser and go to the other instead.

Who is handing out shocks to the liberal media for their repeatedly intentional dishonest reporting? Who is holding them to account when they refuse to cover a major story that redounds negatively to Democrats?

The feeling here is that unless specific reporters can be individually humiliated and made to feel distinct personal embarrassment, they will never change their behavior. Being called out by a conservative evening cable host doesn’t do any good, because the viewing audience is too small and that’s like preaching to the choir anyway.

Maybe a Kevin McCarthy or a Ted Cruz could hold a weekly press conference and list, by correspondent name and example, that week’s worst offenders, the biggest lies, the worst omissions. But this kind of plan runs the very real risk of not being covered by the liberal media, who are highly unlikely to report on bad acts by other “teammates.”

It’s a vicious cycle. The liberal media lie about conservatives, refuse to cover stories that are negative to Democrats, and therefore the average casually attentive swing voter never knows the real story. It’s a nice racket they’ve arranged for themselves. The liberal media rats have unfettered access to all the pain-free food pellet dispensers, without any shocks in sight.

Image: University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences