(The third in a series of nominees, the winner will be announced in a December 27th column. The first and second nominees can be found here and here.)
I’d never throw the keys to our family car to one of my kids and tell them to have a great time. First off, they’re 5 and 4, so they’d be confused and not have anywhere to go. But also because they’re 5 and 4 and have no idea how to drive – the concept is foreign to them. They’re children, so it’s not surprising. Yet, every single day major outlets that became known for once having reported the news to toss the keys to the drippings of what is left of their important and once plentiful credibility to a group of “journalists” who have no idea what the concept of credibility is and are less mentally stable than my children being forced to eat their vegetables. They are our third nominee for idiot leftist(s) of the year.
There are far too many of these thin-skinned crybabies to mention them all, they’re like the special effects team in the credits of a Marvel movie – they take up 5 minutes of fast scrolling across the screen with each member is likely replicable by another person you’ve never heard of without missing a beat. It’s their total more than the individuals, but some of the individuals are useful for illustrative purposes, so we shall explore one of them.
Let’s talk about NBC News activist Ben Collins. Benny had the world on a string just a month ago when, after the mass shooting at a gay club in Colorado Springs, he gave a Golden Globe-nominated performance on MSNBC about how evil Republicans and their heartless push against grown men dressed as women waiving their barely covered genitals in the faces of children was the cause of the shooting. Fellow “journalists” scrambled to their social media accounts to be the member of the Blue Checkmark Brigade who planted their lips on Ben’s behind the deepest; the Pulitzer Prize committee was put on notice that their search for the greatest journalism of the year was over.
The only problem was, as is the case with so much of that profession these days, none of it was true. As a sign of just how far the profession has fallen, Ben was not disciplined for whining on national television about how one side of the political spectrum was responsible for the murder, nor was he reprimanded for being wildly wrong once it became known that the alleged killer was “non-binary” and used “they/them” pronouns, meaning he is firmly on the left’s team.
He didn’t even bother correcting the record because there was no record to correct – Ben didn’t do any journalism or even questioning about the shooting before making his declaration; he made his pronouncements from 2,000 miles away in New York City without ever having set foot in Colorado Springs investigating the killings. Some narratives are too good to investigate.
What would be a humbling experience for most people wasn’t even something worth addressing again for Ben. He moved on. NBC News had no issue with someone projecting their political bias onto half the country and accusing them of murder because NBC isn’t in the news business anymore.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Or at least they want people to think it’s not entirely true.
To that end, NBC News did finally discipline Ben Collins. Not for lying, not for smearing, but for being a douchebag on Twitter about the subject he’s paid to cover.
Being a liberal means you are very much like a child – fairly stupid and ruled by your emotions (with the occasional wetting of yourself, either metaphorically or literally). Ben and his fellow travelers on Twitter can’t control themselves because virtue signaling is the social credit score of the American left and the boogeyman of the moment to the left is Elon Musk. (It’s usually Donald Trump, but he can only release so many NFTs in a week so they’ve begun to diversify.)
Ben “covers” social media and Elon Musk and spends his time on social media campaigning against Elon Musk. Stevie Wonder could look at that and see a problem. Finally, NBC News did too.
When Musk temporarily banned accounts doxing him in real-time, a “woke-off” began. Democrat activists with press credentials scrambled to be the next one banned since being banned in the service of smearing Musk is the left-wing’s equivalent of social credit points in communist China. They’re like North Korea in that they don’t want to be the first person to stop clapping or be seen as not clapping enthusiastically enough, lest they lose the woke-off.
Benny and his fellow travelers began highlighting what got their fellow activists with press passed banned in the hope of getting banned themselves. And they won. None of these people cared when the New York Post was banned for accurately reporting on the Hunter Biden story, they worked to justify it, but when one of their cabals was sending the location of Elon Musk and his kid in real time to a world full of insane people they’d conditioned to think Musk is Hitler reincarnated, well, that’s a bridge too far.
Luckily James Hodgkinson is already dead and these people have yet to create another one, but it’s not for lack of trying.
Ben was “temporarily suspended” from his beat by NBC News over his non-stop smears on Musk and how he’s running the company he owns. In other words, Ben’s trolling of what he’s supposed to objectively cover became too much for even NBC News. It’s surprising to learn NBC News has standards, as low as they are.
Don’t get too excited, they haven’t fired Ben, and he’ll likely be back “objectively” covering the same beat he was suspended for being emotionally childlike about sooner rather than later like he wasn’t disciplined for being a hacktivist, but something is better than nothing…even if just barely.
Ben Collins isn’t the problem with journalism, he’s the avatar of what the problem with journalism is. He’s interchangeable with the likes of Taylor Lorenz, Aaron Rupar, Donie O’Sullivan, Drew Harwell, etc., etc. You can easily find members of this virtue-signaling circle-jerk on Twitter, they usually have their pronouns listed in their bios just after the rainbow and pregnant man emoji and the word “journalist,” right before some version of the “retweets do not equal endorsement” disclaimer. This comes in handy when they crawl through the Twitter feeds of any accounts retweeted even once by any prominent conservative politicians to declare those politicians guilty of “retweeting an account that once tweeted” whatever it is they find this random person once said in junior high school. But when they retweet nothing but progressive propaganda, it’s not meant as an indication of anything. Seeing the scam yet?
These are some of the biggest hypocrites on the planet, Ben Collins just happens to be the name pulled from the hat to represent them here. Their company ID and editors who are afraid to hold any of them accountable, coupled with an echo chamber that empowers them to fail on cable news created cancer currently eating what is left of their profession. It won’t get them today, it might not get them tomorrow, but it will get them. Even the Washington Post – purchased with the pocket change of Jeff Bezos, a man with more money than he could set on fire in his lifetime – is laying people off because their business is failing.
It couldn’t happen to nicer, more deserving people. And without FTX and Democrat mega-donor Sam Bankman-Fried to fund new left-wing media ventures (oh, yeah, his stolen money is all over the liberal media – hello, Semafor!), the normally soft landing leftists are used to will sooner or later be the concrete they gleefully prepare for everyone else. Now might be a good time to start learning to code…
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter and subscribe to his podcasts and you’ll probably increase the odds of you getting what you want for Christmas.
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