Media is truly failing its mission to tell the truth

OPINION:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Huffington Post journalist S.V. Date traded some widely reported barbs the other day rooted in large part over the insistence of Date to pretend not to be a hack for the Democrat Party.

But here’s the thing. All things HuffPost are now hack. Write it down. Make a memo. Put it on a note card. The Huffington Post is not news; not real news; certainly not unbiased news.

Call it entertainment news, if you will — because that’s what the Huffington Post called the leading GOP presidential contender Donald Trump in 2015, when its editorial staff made the stupidly dramatic decision to place all-things-Trump on its entertainment page, rather than political or news sections.

After Trump gained steam in his campaign for president, HuffPost then made the equally stupidly dramatic decision to add disclaimers to its Trump coverage expressing the opinion — supposedly, fact-based — that he was racist, misogynist, xenophobic. Why?

This is what HuffPost, under the headline “A Note on Trump: We Are No Longer Entertained,” wrote a decade ago — “Earlier today, the candidate currently leading in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination called for a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’ That was, of course, Donald Trump. On the heels of Trump’s proposed change for America, we will be changing how we cover him at The Huffington Post. Back in July, we announced our decision to put our coverage of Trump’s presidential campaign in our Entertainment section instead of our Politics section. ‘Our reason is simple,’ wrote Ryan Grim and Danny Shea. ‘Trump’s campaign is a sideshow.’ Since then, Trump’s campaign has certainly lived up to that billing. But as today’s vicious pronouncement makes abundantly clear, it’s also morphed into something else: an ugly and dangerous force in American politics. We believe that the way we cover the campaign should reflect this shift. And part of that involves never failing to remind our audience who Trump is, and what his campaign really represents.”

Of course, HuffPost failed to mention the Trump campaign was responding to the ISIS terror attacks in Southern California where dozens of U.S. citizens were wounded and murdered, and that this terror attack — on U.S. soil! — followed eight years of Barack Obama’s feckless policies as president that gave rise to ISIS atrocities, including ISIS threats to raise its flag over the White House; including the open borders, courtesy of more feckless Barack Obama policies, which seriously compromised America’s safety and security; including the savage killings by illegals against U.S. citizens that took place in America during Barack Obama’s feckless leadership — all leading to and driving the support for Trump in the first place. 

To HuffPost, it was a Trump campaign remark — taken completely out of context — that was the danger, not the consequences and outcomes of Barack Obama’s weakness.

And when Trump won the White House?

“Note To Readers: Why We’re Dropping Our Donald Trump Editor’s Note,” HuffPost wrote — reluctantly — on Nov. 9, 2016. The piece went on to state, “Early in this election campaign, we began appending an editor’s note to our coverage of Donald Trump, highlighting his racism, misogyny and xenophobia. He made no secret of any of it, and he was elected president anyway. That doesn’t make it any less true.”

And boy, did HuffPost still work to make it true.

“A Racist, Sexist Demagogue Just Won The New Hampshire Primary,” HuffPost wrote in February of 2016.

“Here Are 13 Examples of Donald Trump Being Racist,” HuffPost wrote in February of 2016.

HuffPost has not been alone in its open hatred of Trump.

National Review, for example, hosted whole sections of its site to post pieces under the headers of “Donald Trump — Conservatives Should Stand against Him,” from January 2016, and “Anti-Trump Scholars and Writers Group Emerges,” from October 2016, and the more succinct, “Trump: No,” from 2020. And of course, there are the ongoing coverages from MSNBC, The Washington Post, BBC and all the rest — all the anti-Trump, MAGA-hating rest who have become legendary in their digging of dirt to damage this president, this White House, this entire MAGA movement.

But Huffington Post is in a class by itself.

And now, its journalist Date is being called out as a “left-wing hack” by Leavitt, who also wrote on X that he’s “consistently attacked President Trump for years and constantly bombards my phone with Democrat talking points.”

Leavitt further wrote, “Activists who masquerade as real reporters do a disservice to the profession.”

So true.

And those journalists who are truly in the business of telling truths, no matter where those truths might lead, should be the first to agree.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.