Today’s Journalists Seek Power, Not Truth

--J.B. Shurk, American Thinker, Jan. 15, 2024

Since the Democrat News-media’s main election slogan is that Trump caused an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, NBC’s Kristen Welker saw it as her job in her recent interview with Iowa's Sen. Joni Ernst to attempt to force her into incriminating Trump in an "insurrection" that, as liberal George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley says never happened.  

After badgering Ernst to say whether she will or will not endorse Trump in 2024, Welker says:

These are people who attacked the building you were in.  You called them insurrectionists at the time.  Would you not counsel Trump against pardoning them? 

Ernst replies: 

“No, I never called them insurrectionists.  … I do think they broke the law.”

Welker, deceptively changing her accusation, says: 

“That term was used by you in an op-ed in the Des Moines Register.” 

In fact, Ernst did not in that editorial call the people who rioted on January 6 “insurrectionists.” 

These are Ernst’s precise words:

[S]torming the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to influence elected officials — an insurrection as many have called it — is not, and will never be, a peaceful protest. It is anarchy — and America and her people cannot stand for it in any form.

Ernst acknowledged that “many” called the January 6 riot an "insurrection," but the point of putting the accusation in someone else’s voices, “as many have called it,” to note what Ernst said, is to distance the judgment “many” were making from her own. 

Ernst criticized the rioting but ascribed the charge of insurrection to others.

Newsflash for Welker and what remains of our “journalistic” profession:  Simply using a term does not constitute making a specific substantive assertion involving that term.  Not everyone who uses the term “metaphysics” is actually doing metaphysics.  

Got it Kristen? 

Welker also makes a false or misleading statement when she badgers Ernst that 700 of these alleged insurrectionists “pled guilty to crimes related to January 6. Would you support pardoning them?”   

This alludes to her earlier statement that at least 700 of these people pled guilty to “attacking the [Capitol] building.” 

In fact, many of these people pled guilty to minor offenses, not “attacking” the Capitol.

Kevin Sam Blakely and Kerry Wayne Persick both pled guilty to “parading or picketing” inside the Capitol grounds. 

A 69 year-old woman Lois Lynn McNicoll, pled guilty to “Violent Entry and Disorderly Conduct on Capitol Grounds.” 

In fact, a video shows that what this gray-haired grandma actually did was “walk through the door with a U.S. Capitol police officer holding the door for her.” 

Surely the Republic cannot survive that grandma! 

A 74-year old pastor and Purple Heart recipient, James Cusick, pled guilty to a crime because, in the prosecutor's words, he “chose to ignore unmistakable proof of the forcible nature of the riot … that included shattered glass panes near the Senate Wing Door, a blaring alarm sound, and scores of officers converging on the Capitol just as Cusick and his companions [was] about to enter.” 

His attorney replied: “(Cusick) caused no property destruction nor contributed nor aided or abetted any property destruction. Merely seeing property destruction is insufficient.”  

Wait!  Is this America or the Soviet Union?  This 74-year-old pastor ignored something someone else did but did not do anything himself and he is guilty of the crime these other people committed?   Really comrade Welker?             

Welker used much the same deceptive strategy when, using what critical reasoning textbooks call a “complex” or “loaded” question fallacy, asks GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel if Trump’s words [that “I am your retribution”] “make[s] the Republican Party … ‘stand for revenge?” 

In fact, the distinction between retribution and revenge, easily mastered by sophomore philosophy majors back in the old days when university graduates were expected to be able to read at grade level, is one of the most basic distinctions in the philosophy of law.   

Of course, Welker is not the only member of what masquerades as our “news” media, the same “news” media that ran the Trump-Russia collusion hoax for years on no evidence whatsoever, to use these deceptive tactics to cheat the voters out of honest information.  

In one of their recent comical attempts to paint Trump as Hitler, many “journalists” managed to confuse Trump’s factual statement that illegal aliens are “poisoning the blood of our country” by bringing physical diseases like chickenpox, leprosy, HIV, measles and polio into the country with Hitler’s ideological racial talk about poisoning the blood of the country by bringing in non-white races.  The shameless Left stops at nothing.

After playing the “Trump audiotape” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who had humiliated herself when she failed to trap Trump in a May 10, 2023 CNN townhall, sanctimoniously states to Anderson Cooper that on the tape, Trump admits “in his own words” that he retained classified documents.  The problem is that those are Collins’ words.  Trump did not use the word “documents” but only refers to papers.  Aren’t “journalists” supposed to understand the English language? 

More recently, after Trump’s massive win in the Iowa caucuses, both CNN and MSNBC cut away from Trump’s victory remarks. 

Jake Tapper refers to Trump’s condemnation of illegal immigration as “anti-immigrant” remarks. Tapper cannot distinguish between an immigrant and an illegal immigrant, or, presumably, between a gun and an illegal gun. 

This deliberate ignorance of what remains of our “news” media is calculated.  In his Apology (18a-19c), Plato’s record of Socrates’s 399 B.C. trial, Plato describes how Socrates was accused of fabricated crimes by lightweight charlatans who had been embarrassed by Socrates. Socrates can face his present accusers in court but he cannot reply to his shadowy accusers, e.g., the comic poet/playwright Aristophanes who had poisoned people against Socrates long ago in his plays with silly smears. Similarly, since Trump cannot reply to each of the lightweight media comedians who regularly deceptively smear him, it is their deliberate strategy to diminish him by a thousand tiny cuts every day.  The once-noble profession of journalism has been degraded into Democrat party activism. 

This is an important part of the malodorous story of how a decrepit Biden “won” in 2020.  The result is a record number of dead people (853 in 2022) at the U.S. Southern border, a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, record crime across the country, punishing inflation, ballooning national debt, deadly new wars across the globe, and Biden’s approval a well-deserved pathetic 33%. 

Congratulations, media, on your legacy, especially all the dead children at the Southern border!   But, of course, it’s always somebody else’s fault.

Image: Screen shot from NBC News video, via YouTube