DAN GAINOR: With Iran in the crosshairs, press return to their favorite Trump smear

America is in the midst of kicking the snot out of an enemy that has dominated Middle East headlines for nearly 50 years. Naturally, someone in the press is targeting President Donald Trump with absurd new allegations buried deep in the Epstein files. From where? Because journalists still believe that they can drag Trump into the mud even in the middle of the war and win the elections for the D team.

If this sounds familiar, it definitely should. This has been Trump’s media strategy ever since he decided to campaign as a Republican and ruin the left’s plans for global domination. The press spouted every fake claim it could find: claims of Russian collusion, “mostly peaceful” riots, and claims that the Hunter Biden laptop was 100% fake. Remember this Politico headline published on October 19, 2020, just to influence the presidential election? “Dozens of former intelligence officials say the Hunter Biden story is Russian disinformation.”

We now know that the laptop is real and filled with scandalous information about President Biden and his family; so the truth is buried under the mountain of lies from Trump haters and the journalists who love them. They were protecting their man – the “Big Guy” – from laptop fame. So big, in fact, that he managed to pardon his son Hunter Biden before leaving office. All 51 intelligence officials lost their security clearances, but they did the damage they wanted. The press and social media companies concealed the truth.

Even NPR’s notoriously left-wing CEO Katherine Maher admitted in congressional testimony that the network messed up in 2020: “I want to say that NPR acknowledges that we were wrong not to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.” Of course, Biden was still in the White House, NPR was easily getting funding, and the GOP was defeated. NPR won the trio.

This is the context for another claim regarding the Trump scandal. Everywhere the media went this week, the aim was for two names to hit the headlines together: Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. It doesn’t matter if this is an old and unproven claim. Why bother holding back? The only thing that matters is trying to hurt Trump.

And the press was with him through everything. There are angry people on NPR, now much poorer thanks to Trump, who are running this headline: “Justice Department releases some missing Epstein files on Trump.” Or the tabloid-style headline on Radar Online: “‘Missing’ Epstein Files Containing Explosive Trump Attack Claim Revealed by Pam Bondi Hours After She Was Subpoenaed by Congress.”

DAN GAINOR: TRUMP DEFEATED THE PRESS LIKE DAVID DEFEATED GOLIATH. CAN IT HEAL?

Some people can’t hide who they are. The left-wing Daily Beast has published several pieces on the story, including this classic: “Chilling Nicknames Trump Allegedly Used with Epstein Revealed by Accuser.” It included a subheading worthy of the gender studies topic: “EWWWW.” The author of this story, Daily Beast reporter Catherine Bouris, was an American scientist, according to her website, and it shows. Consider this quote: “I understand why I feel powerless when faced with the looming specter of patriarchy.”

Or her pro-trans complaint in another article: “Babes in TERFland.” At least Bouris is not pretending to be impartial. From that piece: “I don’t pretend to be a neutral witness, any more than I am neutral about other forms of bigotry. I don’t think journalism (or whatever it is I do here) needs to be neutral in the face of oppression and injustice to be effective.”

This is an important point of view, as journalists who believe that this time they can take down the Orange Man Bad have taken up their pitchforks and torches a billion times.

An interesting point is that some in the press are now afraid of Trump or, more likely, his lawyers. Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has scored two major lawsuit victories against both ABC and CBS. The two networks agreed to pay millions as a legal settlement. Now media organizations have started to be more careful when reporting about Trump. Some chose to use the word “unverified” in their articles; I’m sure this made their lawyers and accountants happy. The Los Angeles Times, CBS News and the Associated Press all fell into this category.

Other news organizations have used some form of “allegation,” another safe word favored by lawyers. This included our friends at CNN, The Guardian and The Hill. MS NOW has indeed covered up its bases with “unsubstantiated Trump claims.” This is a double word score in Scrabble – The Legal Edition.

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This kind of corporate CYA (cover your claims) shows that this latest set of stories are mostly not even worth the paper they’re printed on.

In the heyday of the press actively censoring the Biden laptop story, The Washington Post published an opinion piece arguing that we can’t trust the claims either way. This is what the same outlet called undeniable denial during the Watergate years. Here’s the headline: “Insisting the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting it’s real.” Schrödinger’s propaganda for the nerds out there.

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It was the subheading of this column that was truly relevant almost 10 years later: “The lesson of 2016 is to be more wary of potential disinformation in 2020.” That’s what we’re dealing with here in the middle of war, where our enemies have turned the internet into a battlefield, tried to endanger our troops, and bombarded us with lies. A place where thousands of American lives are in danger every second, and where the men and women who protect us risk everything to do so. Because President Donald Trump and America are at war with Iran. The press is also at war with Trump.

The late, great President Ronald Reagan would advise us to “trust, but verify.” We need to update the warning for legacy media: “Distrust; they deserve it.”

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