Andrew Kaczynski is a CNN personality who published a misleading hit piece on Joe Kent, a Republican candidate in Washington State running for Congress. Kaczynski’s effort perfectly illustrates the debauched, diseased state of modern “journalism.” Then, when a Republican strategist commented on what Kaczynski had done, Mediaite used exactly the same tactic against the Republican strategist.

Joe Kent is an Army veteran who is running on a platform that would have been centrist back in the 1980s and before. He advocates for American jobs, less government regulation, lower taxes, controlled immigration, the end of foreign wars (once a Democrat position), support for the military and law enforcement, an end to Chinese aggression, and putting America’s interests ahead of those of foreign countries. Only when it comes to the Second Amendment (for) and abortion (against) would he have been recognized as a Republican back in the day.

However, this is 2022, so pro-American values are “far right,” at least as far as Andrew Kaczynski of CNN is concerned. He published a hit piece identifying Kent as a far-right candidate who consorted with a Nazi sympathizer. The “proof” that Kent is far right is that he supports Majorie Taylor Green and Paul Gosar, who also hold once-centrist values.

Image: Joe Kent. YouTube screen grab.

Kent’s big sin, though, is that he was caught “speaking with Greyson Arnold, a Nazi sympathizer.” It’s only in the fifth paragraph of Kaczynski’s attack piece that we hear that the contact between Kent and Greyson was an accidental, “on the street” moment:

In a statement to CNN, campaign spokesperson Matt Braynard said, “Joe Kent had no idea who that individual was when he encountered him on the street and Joe Kent has repeatedly condemned the statements that the individual is accused of making.”

Braynard added that the campaign screens all interview requests and that Arnold approached Kent on the street by what he assumed was a local journalist. “None of the questions gave Joe any indications that the individual had any racist or antisemitic views and, if he had, Joe would have cancelled the interview immediately,” said Braynard.

During the McCarthy era, the left taught America that “guilt by association” was evil. Leftists continued to hold this view when Obama sat for twenty years in the pew of a minister who blamed 9/11 on America, saying its “chickens are coming home to roost.” That same minister also castigated America as a racist country, intoning, “God damn America.” We were assured, though, that Obama was free of the taint of America-hatred. The same was true when Obama consorted with a known violently anti-White and anti-Semitic race hustler. Again, we were told that he didn’t share any of these views.

For the left, though, it’s different when a Republican does it. In that case, simply talking to a stranger on the street is enough to be tarred as a neo-Nazi. This is how the modern media operates. It starts with a kernel of truth (Kent spoke with Greyson) and turns it into a slimy piece of fact-free innuendo.

The hustle continued when Mediate reported that a “GOP Strategist Invokes Death of CNN Reporter’s Daughter To Hit Story He Didn’t Like: ‘I Thought He Would Have Changed.’” That’s the headline. The body of the story is a bit different.

Alex Breusewitz, a Republican strategist, stated on Steve Bannon’s war room that Kaczynski is a “total fake news hack,” who “went through a rough patch.” Breusewitz hoped that this experience meant Kaczynski “would have changed hard and become a decent person,” but was disappointed to realize that Kaczynski remained “a lying piece of crap.”

One would think that calling Kaczynski a “total fake news hack” and “a lying piece of crap” would have incurred Mediate’s ire but that’s not what happened. Instead, it was the polite and oblique reference to “a rough patch” in Kaczynski’s life. At no point did Breusewitz detail what that rough patch was and it’s probable that no one listening to Bannon’s show had any idea what Breusewitz was talking about.

But the left heard that whistle. That polite allusion was, as noted, a crude call-out grinding Kaczynski’s face into the “inside politics” fact that his infant daughter had died. The fact that Breusewitz said absolutely nothing about Kaczynski’s child or her death was irrelevant. The point was to transmute the neutral phrase “a rough patch” into a crude emotional attack and then run with it.

The modern leftist media is unconstrained by traditional rules of reporting. Rather than reporting the facts and letting readers draw their conclusions, modern reporters offer conclusions and then throw in random, often unrelated or meaningless facts.

When I was a litigator, if you could prove to the judge that the opposing counsel was doing this, that counsel could face everything from monetary sanctions to having the case dismissed. In the world of modern journalism, the best we can do is encourage people to turn off the TV and remove these outlets from their browser’s bookmarks.