Dishonest press is the real threat

To the editor:

Having a liberal local paper is a little irritating, but I have to respond when an op-ed uses fake news as an excuse to attack people critical of fake news.

The author begins by saying freedom of the press is vital to our democracy. No one can disagree with that statement.

However, in the piece headlined “Founders knew the value of a free press,” the author tells us that “hostility to the media runs counter to the nation’s founding principles and if unchecked will make for a less-informed public and a government run amok.”

The problem is that fake news has already given us a less-informed public and a government run amok. A less-informed public is one that only hears one side of the story and a government is run amok when it has a two-tiered criminal justice system where Republicans are prosecuted and Democrats get a pass.

The writer tells us that “by and large, the work being done by American reporters is honest in intention and fair in approach.”

It is easy to see how liberal reporters can feel this way when most of their own exposure to the news comes from biased news sources like the Associated Press that routinely builds up the Democratic Party line while barely mentioning the opposing view or not mentioning it at all. A perfect example would be last week’s article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, distributed by the Tribune News Service, on the Hunter Biden plea deal falling through. The story forgot to mention the actual reason the deal was killed. The judge made them admit that Hunter was still under investigation for more crimes and that buried in the document was immunity from any additional charges. The judge refused to allow the immunity and Biden backed out of his sweetheart deal with his dad’s Department of Justice.

It was almost humorous to read that “when mistakes are made they are promptly and prominently corrected.” Would that include the three-year long Donald Trump Russia collusion hoax or the two years it took the major media to admit that the Biden laptop was legitimate?

The writer asks what the founders would think of politicians who baselessly attack the press. You can easily Google the answer. Jefferson was very vocal when President John Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Acts that made it a crime for journalists to criticize the president.

It is actually ironic that our current president played a big part in creating the fake news media. In the 1970s and ’80s, Biden and other Democrats were all over the Sunday morning talk shows lying about gun control. They got away with the lies because their lies were not fact-checked or questioned.

The final piece of the puzzle came in 1993. Biden and other gun haters were everywhere calling for a ban on assault weapons. While they talked about banning semi-automatic rifles, all four major networks showed video of people shooting machine guns. The bill passed because people thought they were banning machine guns. And now the media knew they could actually participate in creating lies and get away with it. Fake news was born.

Now the Twitter files have shown that the FBI, DOJ, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Biden administration were colluding with big tech and the media to censor the truth. In fact, on July 4 a federal judge issued an order limiting how the Biden administration could interact with social media. It was an order that was barely covered.

Censorship and a dishonest national press are the real threats to our republic.

Stephen Erwin

Portland