Freedom of the press is supposed to protect the press from government control. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote: “The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.” Like everything else the Democrats touch, the press is now a corrupted institution that protects the government from the governed.
The Biden White House sent a letter to its media allies Wednesday, directing them to intensify their “scrutiny” of House Republicans after Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced an impeachment inquiry into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation.
“It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies. Impeachment is grave, rare, and historic. The Constitution requires ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote in the letter to top U.S. news executives, according to CNN. “After nearly 9 months of investigating, House Republicans haven’t been able to turn up any evidence of the President doing anything wrong,” Sams added inaccurately.
If we had a truly free press, they’d tell the White House to go pound sand. But the White House knows who their allies are and isn’t afraid to use them. The MSM is simply a mouthpiece for the regime. As Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit often says, “Just think of the media as Democratic party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.”
CNN astonishingly not only reported on the directive from the administration, but then went on to actually do what the White House asked.
The White House sent a letter to top US news executives on Wednesday, urging them to intensify their scrutiny of House Republicans after Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, despite having found no evidence of a crime.
“It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies,” Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote in the letter, which was first obtained by CNN.
The letter, which said an impeachment inquiry with no supporting evidence should “set off alarm bells for news organizations,” was sent to executives helming the nation’s largest news organizations, including CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, the Associated Press, CBS News, and others, a White House official familiar with the matter said.
So far, so good. But then, in the very next paragraphs,
The correspondence comes one day after McCarthy announced that he had directed three House committees to begin an impeachment inquiry into Biden. House Republicans, most of whom have denied that disgraced former President Donald Trump committed any wrongdoing, have long sought to baselessly portray Biden as a corrupt, crime-ridden politician engaged in sinister activities.
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, 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, CNN wrote without evidence.
Just kidding. I added that last part.
The report ends with this:
The Republican House-led investigations into Biden have yet to provide any direct evidence that the president financially benefited from Hunter Biden’s career overseas.
Just like the regime directed!
Yes, the White House is panicking, but they only have themselves to blame. As Victor Davis Hanson writes,
The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.
So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.
True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.
In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.
Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.
Trump was proven right: the Biden family is not just corrupt, but, in particular, Joe Biden as head of the family and Vice President had intervened in the internal politics of an aid recipient, by threatening not to delay but rather to cancel outright all U.S. aid to Ukraine—unless it fired Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor.
They’re circling the wagons, including the ones carrying CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the other leftist mouthpieces.
“Freedom of the press” indeed.