Fake News Journalism
by Eric Early
In a recent San Francisco Chronicle “Opinion” piece headlined, “Journalists seeking truth may not seem neutral. Why that’s okay in today’s political climate,” KQED’S/NPR’S San Francisco reporter Marisa Lagos went to great lengths to redefine the word “journalist” – which she apparently believes she is.
This piece features me as an example of why self-proclaimed “journalists” such as Ms. Lagos are entitled to stray from neutrality. If I have spoken to Ms. Lagos more than twice in my life I would be surprised, and the last time we spoke was approximately six months ago when I was a candidate for U.S. Senate.
Lagos contends that “in an era when one side of the political spectrum is not always operating in good faith, I don’t think neutrality should be the final goal.” In other words, that conservatives such as I are intentionally or naively not operating in good faith. Lagos uses the following interaction with me as an example of this alleged conduct:
“Recently, U.S. Senate candidate Eric Early, someone who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, was on my radio show. Early’s stance on the 2020 election is not an intellectually honest argument to make, even if many Americans agree with it. The facts don’t bear out. So, when I am in the studio with Early in that moment, it’s not my job to stay “neutral” and simply listen. It’s my job to question, to push back – and, yes, call out the lies when they are uttered. It doesn’t have to be confrontational or uncivil, but it is key to doing my job responsibly.
“This is where objectivity becomes key – the ability to set aside personal feelings or opinions and look at the facts, then make a judgment based on that information. Neutrality alone – the idea of not aligning yourself with one side – doesn’t cut it when you’re faced with someone who is lying, obfuscating or being intellectually dishonest, even if they believe what they’re saying. But it’s also a mistake to see objectivity in this kind of situation as taking a side, other than the side of the truth.”
Lies, Falsehoods, and More Lies
Lagos and her friends in most of the media believe they know better than millions of Americans with whom they disagree – and better than peer-reviewed evidence showing fraud in that election. The rest of us must be acting in bad faith and/or are intellectually dishonest.
She has never, to my knowledge, “pushed back against falsehoods” (her words) routinely uttered by the scores of high-profile election deniers with whom she shares the same politics and ideology. Has Ms. Lagos, for example, ever once wrestled with her self-professed neutrality by writing about the “intellectual dishonesty” or simply, flat-out proven lies, of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest, who have spent years telling the world that Donald Trump was not legitimately elected in 2016?
I doubt it.
Not even after the Mueller Report, the Durham Report, and the Horowitz investigation proved otherwise.
There are millions of Americans, perhaps tens of millions, who like me, watched the Trump years closely, and know exactly why we believe the election was stolen. We witnessed live and in living color a four-year-long effort to disenfranchise Trump’s 70-plus million voters on a daily, moment-by-moment basis, as if we were all simply deplorable fools to be ignored and discarded.
We know that nothing would stop that same group of proven liars from using their vast power to throw an election and then lie again by telling the world it was the “most secure” election in American history. One lie after another that millions of us knew in real-time were wrong, illegal, flat-out false, or all three, including:
Obama/Biden/Clinton/Brennan incessantly “investigating” the Trump campaign;
The years-long Russia hoax;
The sham impeachment of Trump based on his short call to Ukraine’s newly elected president Volodymyr Zelensky (which was Kindergarten stuff compared to Joe Biden’s bragging about how he had forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma, the company that employed his son Hunter Biden, by threatening to withhold funds);
The letter from 51 intelligence professionals who knowingly and intentionally lied to the nation – just two weeks before the 2020 election – that Hunter’s laptop had all the “earmarks” of Russian disinformation, a letter that was lapped up as gospel by an intellectually dishonest media;
A 2016 presidential campaign featuring Joe Biden in his basement and Donald Trump speaking to hundreds of thousands of passionate supporters at rallies;
Universal mail-in ballots being introduced for the first time in American history, with millions of ballots scattered around the nation, which all common-sense Americans knew would open the door for fraud;
The nation’s election count in battleground states freezing in the wee hours following election day; and,
Thousands of Americans swearing, in writing, under oath, that they personally witnessed wrongdoing during the election process – none of which evidence was ever adjudicated on the merits, with the lawsuits challenging the election dismissed on standing, mootness, or similar grounds.
Ms. Lagos has no trouble telling her “truth” from the pages of the Chronicle. What is hard is telling the other truth. Case in point: 25-year veteran Uri Berliner – banished from NPR (and by extension from most of the mainstream media) for outing NPR – who revealed publicly that: “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we [NPR} should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless – one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
Here's a shocker: Conservatives have known about the NPR playbook for years before Mr. Berliner outed them. And of course, the playbook continues to be followed by NPR and the media writ large.
Being “neutral” would mean dishing out the same level of contention to all the subjects one covers, not just those with whom one disagrees.
Marisa Lagos’s column succeeded in one vital area however: knowing her predilection for “feelings over facts,” no one should ever take her seriously again.
She’s no “journalist.”
Eric Early is an attorney and a former Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from California. Mr. Early represented Fair Education Santa Barbara in the first of its kind case challenging the now defunct purveyor of Critical Race Theory trainings, Just Communities Central Coast.
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I think it is important to note that the increased use of mail-in ballots was enacted in battleground states in an unconstitutional manner. The constitution clearly says that state legislatures must decide election law. In 2020 election law was changed by courts and governors under assumed emrgency powers justified in the name of fighting covid. Additionally voting hours were extended, drop boxes added, signature verification relaxed. The security of the election was relaxed in multiple ways. Texas joined by other states complained their voters were disenfranchised by these unconstitutional voting security relaxations. The supreme court did not hear the case on standing. There is no doubt that the election changes were unconstitutional. It is no wonder that many feel the election was stolen.
I grew up here, but lived and worked for years in the NYC media world. I'm astonished that people in Santa Barbara still think the “journalists” of NYT, NPR, etc., are telling them anything remotely resembling the truth. The worst thing is listening to Santa Barbarans regurgitate what they just read in mainstream media. I once asked a group of friends if they really believe the crap they were reciting. “Of course we do!” I tried to list the things that the NYT had omitted or lied about over the years, like the Weapons of Mass Destruction, Bush's involvement in the drug trade during the Central American “conflict” - and they literally turned and left. Later I got an email from one of them saying I was “delusional” to think they were being lied to. And these are smart, accomplished people. But they have become cult members. And like all cult members they believe the worst thing they can do is listen to an opposing opinion because that's that mainstream media has brainwashed them into thinking. It's been really depressing for me to lose respect for so many people. That's why this week, I burst into tears over the news about Julian Assange who is the greatest journalist of our era. It gave me hope to think he may be free, hope that maybe this will be a turning point when people might start listening to other points of view and start thinking for themselves.