When Biden aide Ian Sams wanted to leak his strongly worded memo to "Editorial Leadership at U.S. News Media Organizations," he chose CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, who is one of many enthusiastic White House spinners at CNN. Darcy and CNN didn't have enough self-respect to push back on Sams for implying they needed to be lectured on going soft on Republicans.
Instead, in reporting this administration's "breaking" list of demands, the incredibly servile Darcy claimed Sam was right.
"While news organizations have published innumerable fact checks on the matter, they have also often failed to robustly call out the mis- and disinformation peddled by Republicans in their coverage," wrote Darcy. It's "frustrating officials in the Biden White House who believe that the news media should be doing more to dispel lies that saturate the public discourse."
Try to figure out how the press can publish "innumerable fact checks," and yet they still "robustly" failed to "call out" misinformation. Neither the Sams memo nor the Darcy report elaborated on which "lies" about the Bidens are "saturating" the discourse.
Conservatives on Twitter mocked this memo, as if the pro-Biden media needed a public whipping as if they haven't been carrying barrels of Biden water for years.
One could suggest that the Republicans rush into impeachment and devalue its seriousness. But you could not credibly forward this argument if you are a Democrat or a member of the "mainstream media," which twice devalued impeachment against Donald Trump.
The "PBS NewsHour" doubled down on the Darcy spit-and-polish approach by putting Sams on taxpayer-funded TV so he could repeat all the Carvillesque talking points in his memo.
No "fact-checker" at PBS was going to lift a finger as Sams proclaimed the polar opposite of the truth: "The truth is that the president was never in business with his family and that these lies and false attacks that are coming from Republicans, with no evidence, no evidence to back them up, are in fact lies."
PBS co-host Amna Nawaz should have at the very least challenged Sams to specify what's a "lie" and make him answer for Joe Biden's lies in the final 2020 presidential debate: "My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China ... the only guy who made money from China is this guy (Donald Trump). He's the only one. Nobody else has made money from China."
Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler gave Biden four Pinocchios on that lie ... on Aug. 1, 2023.
Biden also denied Trump's allegation in the first 2020 debate that Hunter made "a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow and various other places."
Back in August 2019, Biden boldly proclaimed: "I have never discussed with my son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period." The contents of the Hunter Biden laptop underlined the dramatic dishonesty of this statement, as has the testimony to those supposedly "lying" House Republicans. They documented that Joe Biden lied about never discussing the family influence-peddling business on at least 16 occasions. He lied to reporters. In a perfect world, the entire media would object and correct the record.
The Sams memo implies that our "objective" media are far too objective. That's ridiculous. But it's clear that Democrats -- inside and outside the White House -- expect journalists to practice 100% compliance with Democrat spin. Professionalism equals propaganda.
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.
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