Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote a Sept. 25 article on liberal-media bias headlined "Kavanaugh Supporters See a Conspiracy Afoot." The Post painted this as a little crazy, like a UFO is involved. Can anyone imagine the idea of the Democrats and liberal reporters working hand in glove to torpedo a Republican nomination?
Maybe we can remember Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg in 1987, John Tower in 1989 or Clarence Thomas in 1991. Maybe we can recall John Ashcroft being tarred as a racist in 2001. In these cases and many others, "objective" reporters lined up and repeated the Democrat talking points as "news" and often succeeded in wrecking nominations.
Farhi lined up the deniers. "We aren't colluding with anyone about anything, including the Kavanaugh nomination," said Martin Baron, executive editor of the Post. "The conspiracy theories are pure nonsense and completely false."
"Pure nonsense"? The Post quotes anonymous sources multiple times a day, so how would anyone be able to piece together and figure out the entire collusion experience? The Post claims on the front page every day that "Democracy Dies in Darkness," and it disdains "dark money" in political campaigns. But it loves "dark sources" spicing up its incessant attacks on the Trump administration.
The unintentional laugh lines kept coming. Farhi wrote, "Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson also said journalistic efforts to vet Kavanaugh are the product of hard work, not partisanship." This from the woman who intensely labored to deny Justice Thomas his seat on the court with unproven allegations and kept smearing him as a creepy porn junkie after he was confirmed. So did her old reporting (and book-writing) partner, Jane Mayer, who declared about her present employer, The New Yorker, "We try to be fair, accurate and tough on all sides."
No one should believe any of these collusion deniers. No media outlet perpetuating this Kavanaugh-crushing conspiracy is nonpartisan, or disinterested. They are on a witch hunt.
Judge Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, contacted the tip line at the Washington Post in July because she knew who would be eager to cooperate. She couldn't nail down the time or the place where this alleged incident occurred, but the Post published the allegation anyway on Sept. 16 with maximum sympathy for her, writing, "Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent." Who brought that raw allegation to the surface, if not a media-Democrat campaign?
The Post could only relate that Ford alleged that she was "corralled" by Kavanaugh into a bedroom "one summer in the early 1980s ... at a house in Montgomery County." How on Earth is this enough detail to publish? It isn't.
But that wasn't as ridiculous as the accusation from Kavanaugh's former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez in The New Yorker. She says he exposed his penis to her at a college party and then laughed at her anguish. The paper printed this and even noted that the tale emerged after Ramirez spent six days checking with other people to see if she could convince herself this really happened. Like Ford, she had no witnesses to back her up.
Publishing this gossip is what Mayer calls "tough on all sides."
Even as the newspapers and the networks acknowledged this story was unproven junk, they kept reporting it and talking about it, speculating about all the political fallout. Worst of all, they asserted that all this unproven junk would put an "asterisk" on Brett Kavanaugh's record. Only if the asterisk led to this explanation: "During his confirmation, liberals shoved aside all their principles about due process and proving a story before printing it."
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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