Journalists Mourn That Jack Smith's Probes Are Dead!

Tim Graham on Nov 29, 2024

Democratic attorneys waged legal war on former President Donald Trump on every level of government: federal, state, county and city. Now that he's been reelected, all that legal wrangling is going to be curtailed. Biden-appointed special counsel Jack Smith had to fold his tent, and on Nov. 25, the networks offered live "breaking news" that just sounded like they were the broken ones.

Start with ABC's Jonathan Karl, whose third anti-Trump book was aggressively titled "Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party." That's a little embarrassing for Karl and his publishers now that the GOP controls the White House, Congress and 55% of state legislative seats.

Karl decried the death of accountability for Trump: "He ultimately will not be held to account in the criminal court system for his actions to overturn the presidential election of 2020." Karl is upset that the Orange Man isn't in an orange jumpsuit. No jail, no justice!

CBS reporter Scott MacFarlane, whose primary beat for almost four years now has been treating Jan. 6 as worse than 9/11, was also upset: "The historic case against Donald Trump for allegations he tried to conspire to overturn an election and the ties to that horrific attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, that case is dying with a whimper today."

This pro-prosecutor tone was not the MacFarlane spin when the Bidens were the ones being investigated. He overused the adverb "allegedly" to describe pictures of Hunter Biden's rampant drug use when he was on trial. He lamented special counsel Robert Hur "controversially" stated President Joe Biden would appear too doddering to be convicted in his classified-documents case. Who was whimpering instead of holding politicians accountable then?

NBC's Ken Dilanian, notorious for pushing the fake-news Steele dossier and associated Russian collusion conspiracies against Trump, lamented, "If the lesson of Watergate was that no one was above the law, the lesson of the Trump era is that a majority of Americans have decided that this principle no longer applies."

One "lesson of Watergate" that TV "news" people teach is that Republicans will eternally be slammed as the corrupt sleazeballs who need to resign, while the Clintons and the Kennedys can rape women or leave them to drown, and they're still hailed by the Old Media as America's royal families and the conscience of the country.

Then there was the wailing on "The View" on ABC. Joy Behar tried to joke about Jack Smith closing up shop: "It shows you there's no such thing as karma, doesn't it? It's like the Easter Bunny and affordable housing. It doesn't exist!"

It's all very sad after they treated Smith like he was Eliot Ness (and Trump was Al Capone). In July 2023, CNN made a big deal out of Smith walking into Subway for lunch. Anchorman John King found deep meaning: "Donald Trump tries to intimidate people, he tries to bully people, he tries to scare you away. That was Jack Smith with no words and a simple $5 sub in his hand saying, 'I'm not going anywhere.'"

Now Smith is taking his lunch bag home, and all CNN anchor Paula Reid could do is express grave concern that Trump Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi "will try to weaponize the Justice Department." After all this lawfare, that's a sick joke.

Ever since Watergate, the media's coverage of scandals has underlined the most egregious double standards in political coverage. One side is presumed guilty until proven innocent, and the other side is eternally not guilty. There are no consistent media ethics when the topic is ethics.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.