Up until 2008, although the media was already reliably Leftist, it still kept up the pretense that it was objective. In every election year, it interspersed its cheerleading for the Democrat candidate and put-downs for the Republican candidate with occasional stories that praised the Republican with faint damns, and that damned the Democrat with faint praise. In that far distant time, journalists still spoke about reporting as if their profession required them to relay facts instead of spinning them.

Everything changed in 2008. With the first black Democrat candidate for president, the Leftist collective that is the American media felt that it had a moral imperative to ensure that Obama won. It began the righteous charge, therefore, by destroying Hillary during the primaries (clearly, a “first sort of black president” trumped a “first sort of woman president”).

Then, having performed that job, the media turned its collective wrath on McCain, even while singing endless paeans to the wonder that was Obama, the magic negro, the racial healer, the smartest person in every room, and the guy with the great crease in his pants. The media was so committed to its mission that it ignored entirely basic reporting obligations, such as determining whether Obama’s academic record supported his much-vaunted intellect; whether his professional career suggested a competent man; whether his Christian faith comported with core Christian doctrine or was just a weekly anti-American grievance gathering; and whether his associations throughout his life were of the type (anti-American, anti-semitic, anti-white, etc.) that might give ordinary voters some concern.

Indeed, rather than reporting on Obama, the media did the opposite: anyone who did good, old-fashioned legwork to learn more about the man who wanted to take the helm in America was a racist. If you wished to avoid that repellant label, you took Obama at face value, reserving your reportorial skills for destroying Sarah Palin (whose life, unlike Obama’s, was already an open book).

Once Obama became president, it was pretty obvious that the media had oversold him. He wasn’t a racial healer, he wasn’t the smartest man in the room, he wasn’t a competent manager, he wasn’t a committed Christian, and he was still palling around with anti-American activists, although his palling around now took him all over the world. He elevated Muslim and illegal immigrant concerns over American rights, was (and is) hostile to the Constitution, hated Israel, lied like a rug about Obamacare, and generally was at his best only when he was slow jammin’ on late night talk shows. Everything else . . . meh, not so much.

In 2012, the media did exactly what it had done in 2008. It reported positively on Obama, and negatively on every Republican during the primaries and on Mitt Romney after the primaries. However, possibly nervous about a wholesale repeat of its 2008 campaign for Obama, the media still practice a little bit of reportage that included damning Obama with faint praise, and praising Romney with faint damns. For the most part, though, the media made it clear which candidate it thought should win.

I mistakenly believed in 2012 that the American people, educated by the chasm between the Obama promise and the Obama practice, would have been put wise to the fact that they were not getting actual news (that is, “just the facts”) but were instead on the receiving end of a steady diet of Democrat-party campaign material. Given how bad things were for Democrat players and politics in 2012, I therefore assumed that a savvy public would understand the propaganda and vote Obama out of office. I erred.

While I may have erred in 2012, the media learned its lesson — it can say anything, and it can hide anything, and the uninformed will follow its lead . . . sometimes even as that same credulous public mumbles despairingly that the media is no longer publishing actual, you know, news.

Indeed, the relationship between the public and the media today reminds me of an old cartoon showing a man and a woman sitting at the breakfast table. The man has a newspaper open before him, and says to his wife, “It says here that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.” To which the wife quite naturally responds, “Don’t believe it.”

Of course, having sinned twice and been rewarded, the media is now sinning with over-the-top gusto. No more feeble attempts at even-handedness. Reporters are openly feeding at the Jon Stewart trough. There are no MSM stories about Trump’s success as a businessman, about the people loyal to and respectful of him, about the generous or moral stands he’s taken over the years, or about the fact that his business success shows that he’s actually rather risk-averse, rather than the opposite. Every news report first claims that everything he says is a lie, only to back off from those claims days later, in small print or lost links.

Instead, the media is in a shark-feeding frenzy, with Trump as the chum. Having propped him up during the primaries (“Let’s promote the most unelectable primary candidate for the Republican party”), reporters are going in for the kill. Moreover, they’re going in for the kill with shoddy, dishonest reporting, and they refuse to back down even when proven to have lied. For them, every story about Trump is a successful example of the “Big Lie.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to Hillary, the media is happy to let her vanish for 246 days. They’re happy to report her press releases as news. They’re happy to downplay the fact that she proved to be the greatest national security risk in American history. They’re happy to ignore the fact that she sold out America to fund herself and her husband. They ignore the lies, the physical problems, the mental weirdness, the corruption, the repeated job failures, and all the other stuff that should be on the front page of every paper along with the reporting on Trump.

You’ve notice, I’m sure, that I didn’t put any hyperlinks in the above narrative. Instead, I’m going to link here to a series of articles that prove my point:

The really sad bad news?  Nobody is listening to conservative media except for those who have already bought into the conservative premise. The MSM owns American brains.

Trump didn’t kick a baby out of a campaign rally (and Glenn Kessler gets kudos for reporting on that), but the MSM narrative continues unabated. (More here from the baby’s mom.)

Matthew Vadum has an in-depth, well-sourced discussion of the points I made above.

No, Donald did not mock a disabled reporter; the media just spun it as if he did.

So-called journalists who should be reporting on Hillary are instead cheering for her (after lobbing meaningless softball questions at her).

Negative articles about Trump overflow every MSM outlet, while the negatives on Hillary don’t even make the bottom of the last page.

And don’t forget Pat Caddell’s scathing denunciation of Reuters for gaming the polls to promote Hillary.

Oh, and speaking of Reuters, both Reuters and Getty have almost surreptitiously published photos of Hillary practically being carried up some stairs. That is, the photos are uploaded on their sites, but they haven’t used them in any stories. Unfortunately, Drudge found them anyway:

 

There’s something very wrong with Hillary and Scott Adams is right to say that the American people should demand to see her health records (and Trump’s too, for that matter).

Honestly, I’m at the point where I’m going to vote for Trump just as an act of hostility to the American media.