#FakeNews

By Dwight Patel

While the much-ballyhooed Mueller Report appears to have vindicated President Trump of the non-stop accusations that he colluded with Russia, it has also shed light once again on how the mainstream media favor fiction and conspiracy theories over facts.

On the other hand, this isn’t the first time that media coverage has been vilified by those in the political arena. From former Vice President Spiro Agnew’s colorful reference to some in the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism” to Hillary Clinton’s charge during the Clinton scandals that they were being unfairly attacked by a “right wing conspiracy,” the media have taken their share of the blame for the way they have reported and mis-reported some of America’s most serious political stories.

However, these isolated cases pale in comparison to the deluge of fake news that bombards us every hour of every day.

We who stand on the political right have been complaining about the media bias against conservatives for decades. My first boss in Washington, Reed Irvine, the founder and chairman of Accuracy in Media, made a career out of exposing liberal media bias. In fact, he was America’s very first media watchdog, who launched Accuracy in Media in 1969.

As a result, many of the media elite not only branded him as a “nut,” but went out of their way to try and ignore him. My second boss in this town, Paul Weyrich, founded National Empowerment Television (NET), a network which presented the other side of the story, or as I liked to say, the truth.  This was a network founded by conservatives for conservatives.  Back in the 1980s and 1990s, AIM and NET provided information you couldn’t get from the media elite.  For many years, these two pioneering groups were the only place to get the real truth behind Hillary Care and the suicide of Vincent Foster.

The media’s misreporting of significant world events, which got a head start during the Vietnam War, gained a full head of steam during the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and spent the next eight years demonizing his presidency. #FAKENEWS

And who could forget how in 1995 the media demonized Newt Gingrich and other house Republicans for passing cruel and heartless appropriations bills?  Clinton refused to sign them, causing a shut-down of parts of the federal government for weeks during which the media failed to report on how all of these government workers actually did get paid for their time off. #FAKENEWS

How about the media trial and conviction of Oliver North during Iran-Contra when the liberal press tried their hardest to bring down President Reagan with the help of Lawrence Walsh, who later wrote that he wanted to see President Reagan impeached. 

In 2004 we learned how Dan Rather and “CBS News” made up fraudulent documents claiming that President Bush shirked his responsibilities during his service in the National Guard. After weeks of hand wringing by the left, the truth finally won out, thanks to the New Media and figures like emerging political commentator Matt Drudge.  #FAKENEWS

Although there are many more examples of shoddy journalism, Fake News became even more blatant and inescapable during the 2016 presidential election and escalated to the point where a couple of months ago we saw the media vilify Catholic high school students from Covington Kentucky who were attending the “March for Life” as a bunch of racists.

Although the newly released findings in the Mueller Report may cause a shakeup among some of the media elite whose ratings have tanked, there’s no doubt that most of them remain stubbornly fixated on their goal of inflicting pain – and more – upon the current administration.

It’s all there in black and white, vindicating everything we have said all along.