On Monday, CNN host Jake Tapper became the latest dancer in a conga line of Stephen Colbert cheek-smoochers as his CBS late-night "comedy" show winds down. Liberals get together on television sets to pose as today's equivalent of the Founding Fathers.
In this case, Tapper displayed a pocket square with the First Amendment language that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." He explained "there are a bunch of us that are going to be wearing these" at the upcoming White House Correspondents' Dinner. "These are from the Reporters Committee for the Free Press. Because there may be some guests there that are unfamiliar" with it, he said.
That's funny. Tapper doesn't seem to really understand the concept. Take Jimmy Kimmel being suspended by ABC for lying on national television that Charlie Kirk's murderer was a Trump supporter. Kimmel missed four shows, but Tapper hosted an hourlong CNN special titled "No Laughing Matter: Free Speech Under Attack."
Tapper falsely claimed in that special that Kimmel "wasn't calling the shooter MAGA" and defended his pal Kimmel by saying they were made "hours before ... more details emerged about the alleged killer and his possible motive."
In another late-night appearance, Tapper proclaimed to NBC's Seth Meyers that Kimmel's suspension was "pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime." It's like he's never heard of the 57 Biden administration censorship initiatives.
This man is Exhibit A in people whose outrage meter finds Kimmel's brief suspension more offensive than Kirk's murder.
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Speaking of shutting people down, Tapper has gaudily refused to allow anyone on his programs who would claim that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. On April 12, he unloaded a Sunday sermon on how Trump's judicial nominees should be disqualified for failing to tell Democrats in their confirmation hearings that Joe Biden won in 2020. And yet, he will crusade for a man who boldly denied that Charlie Kirk's killer was a leftist kook, and never apologized for it.
The Media Research Center asked a poll question to 1,000 respondents on the ideology of Charlie Kirk's killer, and only 24% correctly identified him as left-wing. The "Facts First" people failed again.
Jake Tapper knows a lot about Democrats in factual denial. He co-authored a whole book on the White House seeking to suppress stories on President Joe Biden's declining mental fitness. But it's not an attack on freedom of the press when the press censors itself. Nobody had a pocket square for that.
If I were attending this pompous self-celebration ceremony, I'd have a pocket square with Hunter Biden's face on it, because none of these "courageous" journalists wanted to touch what was on Hunter's laptop -- which was aggressively censored by social media giants in the last weeks of the 2020 campaign. Tapper didn't bemoan the New York Post being shut down for reporting on that, which media outlets later acknowledged was real information, not Russian disinformation.
Instead, Free Speech Jake came out of the last presidential debate spitting mad at Trump for talking about Hunter. He described Trump's arguments as "misinformation ... reinforcing itself." He claimed Trump's "running the single most negative sleazy campaign in American history for a major party candidate." His campaign was leveling "charges so heinous I'm not even going to say them."
After Biden won, Tapper attacked people who complained 2020 was "rigged" by the Hunter-censoring media. Complaining about the New York Post being censored was awful. "I almost find them more cynical players than the deniers," said Captain Pocket Square.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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