CBS This Morning on Monday provided a perfect case study in how establishment-media bias works. Against conservatives, of course.
The topic was the Supreme Court vacancy. Here’s how the major networks and the East Coast legacy media play the game. Step one: Choose a flat-out liberal as a supposedly neutral “expert” commentator. Step two: The news anchors let go unchallenged anything the expert says, even if the anchors would openly argue with an analyst who says something almost identical in favor of conservatives instead.
It’s all very subtle, and they do it with the aplomb of stage magicians.
Monday morning, CBS featured as their experts two law professors: Jonathan Turley, who truly does have a history of analysis that sometimes happens to favor the Right and sometimes the Left, and Kim Wehle, who burst into national “analyst” roles in 2017 as a reliably anti-Trump “legal scholar.”
To Turley, host Tony Dokoupil asked technical, procedural questions. To Wehle, though, Dokoupil teed up questions openly inviting her to insert ideological judgments. She was delighted to oblige.
Saying that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was reliably a “liberal-leaning member of the court,” Dokoupil asked how her absence will “change the dynamic.”
Wehle forecast “a solidly conservative court on issues of social justice.” Ludicrously, she said that where the Constitution has “ambiguity,” Ginsburg “would defer to individual rights of individual citizens. [But] a more conservative court might look more towards the rights of entities like corporations.”
This is a flagrantly dishonest trope of the Left. Liberal justices are no more likely to “defer to individual rights” than conservatives; they merely favor certain individual rights while downplaying others. Liberal justices, not conservatives, are far more likely to limit or even abandon individual rights such as the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and speech, the Fifth Amendment right to protect private property from unscrupulous government confiscation, and the Article I protection for the “obligation of contracts.” Also, conservative justices are more likely to protect individual rights against abuses by the administrative state that the Left reveres.
In sum, Wehle’s depiction of who protects individual rights was utterly unfair. If that absurdity from Wehle was bad, though, what came next was awful.
“Justice Ginsburg was a strong advocate for voting rights,” she said. “The conservatives on the court are not.”
This is hogwash. It’s also calumny. For conservative legal eagles, the issue isn’t whether to support voting rights, but whether to protect those rights from the fraud of others. When illegal voters cast ballots, or ballots are cast in the names of dead people, then the votes of real, legal voters are effectively nullified. If 10 honest votes are cast for Candidate A, but 10 illegal ones counted for Candidate B, the voting rights of Candidate A’s supporters have been entirely canceled out.
Frequently, it is poor, black voters who are cheated. That’s what happened, for example, in Hale County, Alabama, where political bosses used massive fraud in a series of elections to overcome efforts of reformist black voters to jettison a corrupt political machine.
What’s important here, though, is not to litigate the merit of each position. Instead, what’s wrong is the journalistic ethics. If any “legal expert” even dared to assert that conservative justices care about voting rights, but liberals don’t, the news anchor would immediately challenge the statement. Not here, though. Blatant smears against conservatives are not just allowed to pass unchallenged, but approved with the anchor’s nods and smiles.
This isn’t journalism; it’s propaganda. It’s insidious and invidious. And it’s the establishment media’s stock in trade.
