Press-gang is a term used to describe the use of troops working to round up and press free men into military service. Looking at the work of Dana Bash at CNN and the entire Washington Post staff, I think we need another definition: People posing as journalists working to bend our minds to untruths designed to fluff up the Democrats. From the absurd Dana Bash “interview” of Kamala Harris, her first since being nominated to the highest office without ever having received a single vote, to the slavish coverage in the Post, it’s clear they cannot defend the Democrats’ unpopular policies. Instead, they work to hide them, and treat the entire presidential campaign as if it were the selling of new and “improved” laundry soap. (Maybe they’re just auditioning for the ad agency jobs they hope to get when readers and viewers permanently tune them out and their jobs are abolished.)

It’s not a particularly new development. Years ago, a friend was an editor at Time when it was substantially more prestigious and influential than it is today.  He told me senior editors bet they could make anyone they chose elected president. They chose Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer, made him the second coming in their pages and it worked. Today, I doubt that any single publication or television news staff has that degree of power, but working in tandem they still try.

Washington Post

(1) Tonga Drag Show

There must be no news of interest to readers this week, because a fourth of the front page and two full pages in the first section were about a drag show in Tonga.   

Two reporters had been assigned to cover this story. The drag show is important and its participants brave, we are told because (a) while Tonga has long had strict laws against homosexuality and cross dressing,( b) nevertheless it has “a long tradition “ of men acting like women, (c) “as in the United States, the growing influence of the Mormon Church and the evangelical ministries… has led to a backlash against  LGBTQ+ rights… [unnamed] experts said. ” Tonga is a socially conservative country and criminalizes male homosexuality and cross dressing though the law is apparently rarely enforced. I seriously doubt this long-standing tradition was much influenced by Mormons or evangelicals from the U.S. or Tongans with ties to them. Quite simply the story is not important because Tonga and its culture are important to Post readers; it gets prime coverage to disparage some culturally conservative religions and overestimate their reach here and abroad in an effort to normalize behavior which in most places around the world is still considered unacceptable. Most Islamic countries, to take one significant example, are extremely hostile to homosexuality, often resulting in imposition of the death penalty, which is why it is astonishing to see Gays for Gaza, a place where they’d be tied up, blindfolded, and tossed headfirst from the highest building.  When the Post finds the same amount of space to cover that I will be astonished, for it’s something they cannot blame on the West or conservative Christians. 

(2) Walz’s Tater Tots

The feature sections of this and most newspapers are characterized by soft appeals to those who guide their lives by “feelings,” so it is not surprising that Democrat reporters manipulate readers very obviously there. Wives of Republican figures are criticized if their clothing choices are too conservative (Laura Bush) or, alternately, too costly (Ann Romney), or simply ignored altogether (Melania Trump), and Democrats and wives of Democrat officials find their fashion choices uniformly praised no matter how gauche, pedestrian, or expensive. Even the recipe section gets into the act. This week, Tim Walz’s rather disgusting hotdish tater tots were featured in a very long piece with pictures of the dish and Walz’s head with tater tots swirling halo-like around it. 

The point of giving this play is not because hotdish tater tots is so wonderful a dish. It’s to show readers how down to earth and “self-effacing” the serial liar and far-left vice-presidential candidate is -- at the same time allowing the sophisticates to confirm their superiority over the rubes in the Midwest:

The instructions call for you to make a roux, but they don’t call it a roux. They ask you to add milk and half-and-half to the roux to create a béchamel, but they don’t call it a béchamel. They ask you to add cheese to the (admittedly enhanced) béchamel to turn it into a mornay sauce, but they don’t call it mornay.

Tucked into Walz’s Upper Midwest hotdish, in other words, are techniques that would not be foreign to anyone with a copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” I’m loath to make pronouncements about a dish I knew so little about three weeks ago, but based on conversations with food-writing peers and my own spasmodic Googling, I think it’s fair to say that hotdish, at least historically, has leaned more into manufactured foods than into Mmes. Child, Bertholle and Beck and their authoritative cookbook.

So, in a section which lately features recipes for tofu, kale, and quinoa, and yammers about highly processed food, can you think of a reason to feature this garbage except to promote Walz’s candidacy?

(3) The Arlington Cemetery Hoax

I can fully understand why Biden and/or Harris wanted to avoid appearing at a ceremony honoring 13 U.S. servicemembers who were murdered in the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, a decision Harris admits she played a key role in. But the fact that Donald Trump, at the invitation of the families of the fallen, did show up at the ceremony in Arlington makes them look even worse.  So NPR and then the Post did their part in suggesting Trump did something wrong, to bury the real story -- that the architects of their slaughter hadn’t the guts to show up. Some functionaries at Arlington cemetery had  decided Trump couldn’t be there and Speaker Mike Johnson had to intervene to enable him to participate in the ceremony.  Of course, in an effort to bury any reminder of the Afghan fiasco and the fact that the families wanted Trump because he always was supportive of them, the press distorted the event into a claim that Trump was politicizing their deaths and got into a made-up contretemps with a cemetery employee about having a private photographer memorialize the laying of the wreath 

Gold Star families had invited Biden and Harris on July 28th and August 9th and received no response.

And just to keep the record of Arlington Cemetery’s rule on photos straight, here is a photo Biden took there in 2010  overlooking a tombstone which was republished in his 2020 campaign literature.

As reported by the Post:

LaCivita posted video on X on Monday of Trump laying flowers at the grave of Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, a soldier killed in the explosion, and speaking to his family on the phone.[snip]

The campaign also defended itself with a joint statement from the two injured Marines who appeared with Trump and the families of some of the service members killed, saying they wanted Trump and his cameras there.

Darin Hoover, whose son, Staff Sgt. Darin “Taylor” Hoover, died in the bombing, reaffirmed that in an interview Wednesday.

“We invited him. He didn’t come to us,” Hoover said. “He has shown nothing but sincerity to all of us and for what happened to our children, and for anybody else to try to take that away from the ceremony -- both at the wreath-laying and at the graveside -- is unconscionable.”

Hoover and some of the other grieving families also participated in the Republican National Convention and said Biden has not granted multiple requests to meet with him. They have grown closer to Trump over the years after bad interactions with Biden, who has offended some Gold Star families by discussing the death of his son Beau, who died of brain cancer after returning from serving in Iraq, in a meeting with them.

See how this works? The story in the mediaverse bubble is not that 13 soldiers died in the Afghan withdrawal or that Biden and Harris are responsible and afterwards disrespected the fallen and their families and failed to show up at the memorial, which makes it worse; no, the story is that Trump, who would never have left Afghanistan as Biden and Harris did, and would never have ignored these men or their families, was “politicizing” their deaths.

CNN

There’s little more to be said about the CNN tandem Harris-Walz ”interview” that hasn’t already been said.  An interview by Dana Bash, a Democrat partisan who asked  softball questions, volunteered suggested answers to the tongue-tied Harris, failed to follow up vague answers with clarifying questions, and kept a neutral straight face when Walz blamed his decades of lying about his military record on “bad grammar” or Harris whiffed an inquiry about her supposed policy flipflops by saying her “values” remain the same. Viewers can, I suppose, be expected to discern those values themselves. A supposed 41-minute interview was cut to 18 minutes, no transcripts will be released, and if what was released is any indication what was cut, it was more ridiculous than what was not. Sections of the most memorable of the exchanges can be found here.