“Acceptable Dishonesties”

How President Barack Obama cheated to win, and how the mainstream news media (MSNM) gaslighted to help him get away with it.

My apologies for the length of this article, but there’s no short way to prove a long-term pattern of behavior. If you don’t feel like going through all the details, here’s a brief, “too long; didn’t read” summary:

The Short, TLDR Version

The Bias: The mainstream news media (MSNM) uses a double standard when reporting on politics: they diligently call out Republicans for lies and other wrongdoing, but frequently let Democrats off the hook for the very same misbehavior. (If someone ever asks you to prove the MSNM is biased, just send them to this article.)
Medicare’s Missing Space Telescope: As one example of this bias, Barack Obama misspent billions from the Medicare trust fund to get himself re-elected in 2012, and the MSNM let it happen.
You Can’t Keep Your Plan: Another example: for over three years, the Obama administration knew they would break their “you can keep your plan” promise on Obamacare, but said nothing. And the MSNM has left you largely in the dark about it.
“100-Year War”: One more example: leading Democrats — Obama, Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean — all told precisely the same egregious lie in the 2008 election, and the MSNM let it happen.
Still More Gaslighting: Beyond these examples, I’ve created an extensive timeline cataloguing story after story that the MSNM would have covered more intensely if those stories had been about Donald Trump rather than Barack Obama.

Basically, the MSNM treats a lot of dishonesty as entirely acceptable so long as it comes from a Democrat. If you’d like to see the evidence that backs up what I’m saying, read on.

Acceptable Dishonesty

The mainstream news media (MSNM) routinely (and correctly) criticizes right-wing news media outlets such as Fox News and Info Wars for their misinformation. But, at the same time, the MSNM keeps giving Americans a good reason to go to these news outlets. That’s because the news coverage provided by the MSNM consistently has large gaps that need to be filled in.

What I mean is this:

By now, we’re all familiar with the way the MSNM responds to lies told by Donald Trump. It’s a process we’ve seen play out dozens (if not hundreds) of times since Trump entered presidential politics in mid-2015. It goes something like this:

1. Trump lies.
2. The MSNM promptly collects evidence to debunk what Trump said.
3. The MSNM raises the alarm to the American people, sharing the evidence and spreading the word so effectively (and effusively) that it is virtually impossible to follow up on the news without knowing that Trump’s aforementioned remarks were a lie.
4. Trump’s lie is tallied on an exhaustive list of his lies.
5. The MSNM reminds Americans that Trump’s latest lie is part of a long pattern of lies, effectively supporting the reputation that Trump has as a person who habitually lies (i.e., that he is a liar).
6. As an additional step, sometimes a comedy show will mock Trump for his lie, and the MSNM will then report on this mockery as a news story in its own right, which yet again reminds the public of Trump’s dishonesty.

Roughly the same process applies when Trump contradicts himself, breaks a pledge or does something incompetent, etc.

Now, I have no problem with the way the MSNM confronts Trump’s dishonesty and incompetence. In fact, I think they’re doing the job that a responsible news media ought to do.

But it’s painfully obvious that this isn’t anything like the way the MSNM responded to lies told by President Barack Obama (hence the gap that needs to be filled in). Over and over and over, when Obama lied or contradicted himself or broke a pledge, etc., the MSNM let it slide. They repeatedly let Obama get away with precisely the kind of behavior for which they justifiably vilify Trump.

Essentially, the MSNM regularly treats Obama’s lies as acceptable and not really newsworthy, while treating Trump’s lies as inappropriate behavior that all Americans must know about. They hold Trump and Republicans to a higher standard than Obama and Democrats. I’m not saying Obama lied as much as or more than Trump (though I’ll have more to say about that later). And I’m not saying the MSNM never goes after Democrats for lying or other misconduct. But there’s clearly a massive disparity in the amount, intensity and tone of their coverage of dishonesty, self-contradiction, incompetence, etc., a disparity which overwhelmingly favors Democrats.

And that disparity is easy to see when you look at the timeline I’ve made of Obama’s lies, broken pledges, name-calling, evasions, ad hominem reasoning and other misbehavior (including his misuse of billions of dollars taken from the Medicare trust fund, which I’ll go into soon). It’s a long list; like I said, there’s no short way to demonstrate a long-term pattern of (mis)behavior.

The timeline I’ve made contains a robust (though by no means exhaustive) inventory of Obama’s various misbehaviors. Many of them will be news to you, because the MSNM by and large didn’t cover them prominently when they happened, didn’t challenge Obama and his allies on them, didn’t publicize evidence proving Obama to be in error, didn’t repeat and saturate the American public with coverage of said misbehavior, and didn’t report that Obama was mocked for his misbehavior on a late-night comedy show.

The MSNM tends not to treat Democrats that way. (Neither do the late-night comedy shows, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

This is a remarkably effective disinformation tactic, because fighting it means challenging not sound bytes but silence. It’s easy enough to flag a false story that millions have seen on social media, but how do you flag a true story that hardly anyone has even heard about? I suppose you could collect many such stories in one place and stack them together in a timeline, one after the other…

That is, a timeline like the one I’ve created. It has hundreds of instances when the MSNM could have — just like they do with Trump — cast Obama as dishonest or hypocritical or self-contradictory or incompetent, but simply chose not to. For each of these instances, ask yourself, “If Donald Trump had done this, would it have gotten more alarm and attention from the MSNM?”

You’ll find that you almost always answer “yes”.

Again, if someone asks for proof that the MSNM has a left-wing bias, don’t get into a lengthy, contentious discussion with them. Just send them here so that they can review the evidence for themselves.

What follows below are some highlights from the timeline of Obama’s “acceptable” dishonesties — such as the bogus Medicare spending — along with my thoughts on the implications and consequences of the MSNM’s gaslighting.

Medicare’s Missing Space Telescope

Perhaps the single biggest story that the MSNM managed to keep from becoming common knowledge is how Obama spent billions from the Medicare trust fund to win re-election in 2012. You could practically lift a phrase from the impeachment of Donald Trump and say that Barack Obama was driven by political ambition to abuse his presidential authority in order to achieve the personal goal of getting himself re-elected…

Here’s the gist of what happened:

The Obama administration spent $11 billion from the Medicare trust fund on “research” that hasn’t resulted in anywhere near $11 billion in savings to Medicare. All it really seemed to accomplish was saving Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Let’s go into it in a little more detail:

Obama’s health care reform bill — the Affordable Care Act (AKA, “Obamacare”) — cut federal funding to Medicare Advantage (AKA, “Medicare Part C”). Medicare Advantage health insurance plans have been around for over 20 years, and have become increasingly popular since 2005. As such, Obamacare’s cuts threatened to turn some seniors against Obama in the 2012 election. So Obama took money from the Medicare trust fund and spent it on a Medicare “demonstration program”. This program demonstrated nothing of any real value, and was really just a convenient way to lessen the cuts Obamacare made to Medicare Advantage without going through the trouble of passing more legislation through the very same Congress that had passed the cuts to Medicare Advantage in the first place.

The timeline makes the story clear (click on the wrench in the lower right of the timeline and search for the tag — tag:Health Care - MAQBPDP; the relevant results will show up as brighter dots on the timeline bar at bottom), but I’ll cover the deeper details here, as well.

The chronology is as follows:

On the campaign trail in 2008 (and while stumping for health care reform up into 2010 when Obamacare was passed), Obama repeatedly promised to end “giveaways” to health insurance companies. He didn’t always clarify to his audience what he was referring to, but he meant the federal spending on Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage tends to cost more (as well as provide more benefits) than “original” Medicare (that is, Medicare Parts A and B). Obama fulfilled this pledge in March 2010 with the passage of Obamacare, which made cuts to Medicare Advantage, bringing its funding more in line with original Medicare. (These cuts also helped Obamacare be scored as deficit-neutral by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).)

Later that year, however, Democrats were crushed in the November 2010 midterm, losing 63 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate. The magnitude of this “red wave” rout must have made Obama worry about his prospects for re-election in 2012. So, one week and one day after that massive midterm defeat, the Obama administration enacted MAQBPDP: the Medicare Advantage Quality Bonus Payment Demonstration Program.

MAQBPDP vastly increased — often by 10 times or more — the quality bonus payments to be made to health insurers running Medicare Advantage plans, thus counteracting much of the Obamacare cuts. (I assume the payments also worked against Obamacare’s status as deficit-neutral.)

Officially, the MAQBPDP spending was supposed to investigate — that is, “demonstrate” — whether bigger quality bonus payments would improve health outcomes for people on Medicare Advantage, or maybe clue us in on more efficient ways to spend Medicare Advantage money. The goal of any Medicare demonstration program is, after all, to “measure the effect of potential program changes”. And, in the name of this particular “demonstration”, MAQBPDP spent $11 billion — for perspective, roughly the cost of the James Webb Space Telescope — over three years. (No, I wasn’t actually going to claim that Obama spent Medicare money on a space telescope. Shame on you.)

But MAQBPDP never “demonstrated” much of anything. It couldn’t, because it was set up without a standard control group — that is, a group of people also on Medicare Advantage but NOT getting quality bonus payments. Without such a control group to serve as a comparison, it was hard to draw any definitive conclusions about what effect the bonus payments had had.

Why was there no control group? Because a control group would have meant millions of seniors (and potential 2012 voters) NOT getting bonus payments and instead enduring the cuts that Obamacare made to their Medicare Advantage plans. And that would have provided them with a reason to not vote for Obama in the 2012 election.

Now, some people did try to raise the alarm about MAQBPDP. In fact, the very same Government Accountability Office (GAO) that heavily criticized Trump for withholding aid to Ukraine also heavily criticized the Obama administration for MAQBPDP. In the months leading up to the 2012 election, the GAO even recommended cancelling MAQBPDP. Fortunately for Obama, though, the MSNM didn’t take much notice, and as a result, neither did you. Again, I’m going to guess that you’re probably hearing about all this for the first time.

(In fact, just for giggles, go to any MSNM outlet’s website, search for “Trump Ukraine”, and see how many search results you get. Then do the same for “Obama quality bonus Medicare”. Guess which one will ring up way fewer results, if any? Really, do it: let the MSNM look at their website analytics and see how many people are searching their website for truth and Not. Finding. It.)

To date, I haven’t found any word that MAQBPDP resulted in any improvements in health outcomes or spending efficiencies for Medicare Advantage. In fact, when MAQBPDP’s results came out in late 2015 and early 2016 (see p. 55 of the latter link for the program’s hesitant conclusions), the Obama administration held no press conference and the MSNM ran no stories or articles about it. You’d think $11 billion worth of research spending would provide us with some tangible knowledge and kick off a little fanfare — like what we’d get if we spent the same amount on a space telescope.

But, then again, when you don’t compare Medicare Advantage plans getting quality bonus payments to Medicare Advantage plans NOT getting quality bonus payments, what CAN you expect to learn about quality bonus payments, really?

The MSNM clearly knew about the Obama administration’s shenanigans and had plenty of opportunity to make it an issue — after all, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas on MAQBPDP the same day as the final 2012 presidential debate — but this bogus use of Medicare money never made the headlines or the top-of-the-hour news coverage. The MSNM consciously chose not to raise the alarm about MAQBPDP to the American people.

So, to distill the MAQBPDP scandal down for the fact-checkers:

1. MAQBPDP was a large, expensive research program involving millions of people. There aren’t many research programs that spend so much or involve so many “test subjects”.
2. MAQBPDP resulted in worthless data, in that there is no indication that the value of what we learned from MAQBPDP is anywhere close to the $11 billion we spent on it.
3. Including a control group in MAQBPDP would have both increased the value of the program’s data and lowered its financial cost. But instead, Obama spent more money for worse science.
4. Without MAQBPDP reducing Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage, Obama would almost certainly have lost Florida in 2012. He could also have lost Ohio, Nevada, Colorado and other states, potentially costing him the 2012 presidential election. More, if the MSNM had prominently covered MAQBPDP as the phony program that it was, Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign would have been run under the cloud of a massive scandal regardless of whether MAQBPDP were enacted or cancelled. (Something to think about: an Obama loss in 2012 would almost certainly have meant that Mitt Romney, not Donald Trump, would have been heading the GOP ticket in 2016.)
5. If Trump had enacted MAQBPDP — or were to introduce something similar in time for the November 2020 election — it would be covered by the MSNM as an “anti-science” abuse of presidential power and openly discussed as grounds for impeachment. Looking back on how the MSNM has covered Trump’s time in office so far, it’s safe to say there’s no way the MSNM would remain as quiet about it as they did when it was Obama’s scandal. Really, if Trump spent billions researching hydroxychloroquine or a coronavirus vaccine without including a control group or testing against a placebo, we’d all hear about it and hear what a bad idea it was.

Unless Obama — or former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius or former Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Donald Berwick or someone else — can show us some spectacular, worth-every-penny-of-11-billion-dollars data from MAQBPDP — data that wouldn’t have been even better with the addition of a standard control group — MAQBPDP will forever be the Obama scandal that never was. And that, of course, is thanks to the MSNM.

But, hey, maybe Obama is saving that spectacular MAQBPDP data for his upcoming memoir.

That’s the MAQBPDP scandal for you: the Obama administration committed the crime, and the MSNM provided the cover-up.

Keeping Quiet About Keeping Your Plan

You probably already know that Obama didn’t keep his “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” promise on health care reform. But did you know that the Obama administration knew for years that they would break that promise, and kept quiet about it?

In fact, over three years before Obamacare’s health insurance marketplace rolled out in October 2013, Obama’s own Health and Human Services (HHS) department predicted that many, many people would lose their chosen health insurance plan. But at no point did Obama or Sebelius or anyone else step forward and say, “Folks, it turns out we can’t keep that promise we made, and we’re telling you now so that you have time to figure out what to do in case the health care plan you use is no longer available.”

That is to say, for a whole three years, neither Obama nor Sebelius — nor any brave whistleblowers among the supposedly non-partisan professional bureaucrats in the HHS — not one of them did the minimally decent thing and give Americans the heads up about what might be in store for their health insurance.

Again, the timeline lays out the scandal clearly (click on the wrench in the lower right of the timeline and search for the tag — tag:Health Care - keep your plan; the relevant results will show up as brighter dots on the timeline bar at bottom). Obamacare was passed in March 2010; the following July, HHS issued regulations predicting that, of the millions of Americans in the individual health insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of them would lose their health insurance plan. This was over three years before Obamacare’s rollout on October 1, 2013.

It wasn’t until later in October 2013 that the MSNM finally reported on the HHS regulations, which had somehow escaped their (and Obama’s) notice for, again, over three years. But even then, the MSNM didn’t make much of the fact that the American people had been repeatedly misled about Obamacare.

Once more, what are the odds that many of you are just now learning about this for the first time?

And notice that, while PolitiFact declared Obama’s “keep your plan” pledge to be 2013’s “Lie of the Year”, the MSNM at most only pointed out that PolitiFact had called it a lie; the MSNM didn’t, itself, join in on calling it a lie as they so eagerly do when Trump lies. PolitiFact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” declaration didn’t even bother to mention the HHS’s July 2010 prediction that anywhere from two in five to two in three people on the individual market would lose their plan.

Naturally, had Trump done the same thing as Obama did, the MSNM would have set off the alarm to make sure every American knew what was going on (likely with the help of an HHS whistleblower promptly pointing out the broken promise). And the MSNM would have openly questioned whether Trump’s failure to fulfill his pledge would cost him the support of his base, as they always do. But nothing of the sort happened to Obama.

So Obama misled people, and the MSNM didn’t catch on to it before the 2010 midterm or the 2012 election or before Obamacare’s 2013 rollout. And they hardly made any fuss when they finally did catch on. This scandal, combined with MAQBPDP, would easily have sunk Obama’s re-election if the MSNM (or those brave HHS whistleblowers) had spoken up in time.

But, of course, they didn’t, and “keep your plan” became just another act of dishonesty that the MSNM deemed perfectly acceptable.

100 Years of “Going Low”

“When they go low, we go high”, declared Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democratic convention. It was a nice summation: Democrats, after all, want everyone to believe that it’s Republicans, and not Democrats, who resort to incivility and dishonesty in order to win elections.

This, of course, is pure fiction. But it’s fiction that the MSNM wants you to believe is true.

You see, by the time Michelle Obama made her “go high” declaration, there was plenty of evidence lying around in plain sight proving that Democrats — and Barack Obama in particular — were more than capable of “dirty politics”. But the MSNM, ever ready to gaslight the public in order to help Democrats, conveniently downplayed or entirely overlooked that evidence.

One of the earliest and most telling examples of the “go low” political strategy adopted by Obama and fellow Democrats — and mostly ignored by the MSNM — comes from the 2008 election, when they simultaneously misled the public about Republican Sen. John McCain.

Some background:

Early in 2008, in the wake of the Iraq Surge phase of the Iraq War, McCain had said that he would support a long-term, 100-year US military presence in Iraq “as long as Americans are not being injured, or harmed, or wounded or killed”. In other words, he supported a long-term, peacetime presence like what we’ve had for decades (and still have today) in places like Japan, South Korea and Germany. This would, of course, be in contrast to the wartime presence that the US had in Iraq in 2008.

Democrats quickly pounced on McCain’s remarks — including presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean and Barack Obama — misleading (if not out-and-out lying) in unison, as you can see clearly on the timeline (click on the wrench in the lower right of the timeline and search for the tag — tag:Iraq War - McCains 100 years of war; the relevant results will show up as brighter dots on the timeline bar at bottom). They insinuated or outright accused McCain of supporting “100 years of war in Iraq”. Just for good measure, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also ran an ad doing the same thing.

But, contrary to the way the MSNM loudly exposes and denounces lies told by Trump, Trump’s administration and the GOP, the MSNM barely batted an eyelash at the “100 years of war” lie. (Just compare it to the way the MSNM jumped to denounce Trump’s lie that Joe Biden supported “defunding the police”.) Even worse, some members of the MSNM — such as Rick Sanchez of CNN and Chris Matthews of MSNBC — joined in on spreading the lie.

In fact, what little push-back the MSNM did offer only proves how lenient they are towards Democrats. When Meredith Vieira asked Obama in April 2008 to defend his distortion of McCain’s remarks, Obama refused. He immediately pointed to the video of McCain’s remarks on YouTube, saying that the video proved McCain supported a “long-term occupation” of Iraq.

But an “occupation” — particularly one in which US troops “are not being injured, or harmed, or wounded or killed” — is not the same thing as a war. And Obama had specifically vilified McCain for being “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq”, not for supporting a peacetime occupation. So, first, Obama lied about McCain supporting 100 years of war, and then he pretended he hadn’t accused McCain of supporting 100 years of war.

Basically, Obama avoided responsibility for one lie by telling yet another lie.

Now, you’d think that this doubling-down on dishonesty would have resulted in ever more intense, frequent and antagonistic coverage from the MSNM (as happens when Trump doubles down on a lie). But, instead, the news coverage suddenly evaporated, leaving Obama entirely in the clear and unaccountable for his blatant falsehoods. The other Democrats who lied about McCain — Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, etc. — also came out unscathed by the MSNM’s discerning talons of truthiness.

But it gets even worse. After one of Obama’s surrogates, Susan Rice, reiterated the “100 year war” deceit, the Obama campaign had the gall to post Rice’s remarks on “Know the Facts”, the Obama campaign’s fact-checking web page.

To repeat: the Obama campaign posted an outright lie on the fact-checking portion of their website. Did the MSNM blow up in response? Did The Daily Show’s John Stewart mock Obama for this comical hypocrisy? No. Why not? Because Democrats.

“Because Democrats” is a pretty good answer in general to any questions you might have about the MSNM’s asymmetrical political news coverage. Same for late-night comedy’s relative lack of interest in poking fun at Democrats for their dishonesty. There was (and is) comparatively little or no Daily Show derision of the misbehavior of the Democratic Party, no Saturday Night Live skit lampooning the pantheon of liars inhabiting leadership positions in the Democratic Party, and virtually no parodying whatsoever of the MSNM itself for journalistic bias. Why? Because they prefer Democrats and want Democrats to win elections.

Or, in shorthand, “because Democrats”.

Speaking of nice summations: the “100 years” lie is emblematic of Obama’s phony commitment to civil discourse, just like the MSNM’s gaslighting on Obama’s lie is emblematic of their phony commitment to comprehensive, unbiased, objective political news coverage. Just imagine what would happen if Donald Trump said the people pushing for US troops to remain in Germany wanted 100 years of war there…

Don’t forget, the “100 years” lie is just one in a long list of Obama’s lies and other misdeeds that the MSNM deemed acceptable and chose not to highlight to the American public. Obama unapologetically broke any number of campaign pledges, such as on health care reform, immigration reform, same-sex marriage, serving out his full Senate term, recognizing the Armenian Genocide and more. (How many news outlets recently mentioned Obama’s flip-flop on the “Jim Crow relic” that is the Senate filibuster?)

And, despite his frequent calls for civility, Obama regularly refused to denounce lies, name-calling and other invective spewed by his allies (such as Harry Reid, Alan Grayson, Jimmy Hoffa and others). He didn’t exactly rein in his own “social Darwinism” name-calling and demonizing, either (and neither did the MSNM, even though they readily point out name-calling from Donald Trump).

No surprise, but the MSNM tended not to mention any of these events individually, and certainly never stitched them together for the public into a narrative of “there goes Obama, lying through his teeth again”. No, that kind of diligent reporting is typically reserved for Trump and Republicans. Democrats tend to get more sympathetic treatment. Call it a form of “privilege”, or maybe “fake news” that got the seal of approval from the MSNM.

The result is that, when Michelle Obama says something like, “when they go low, we go high” — or when Barack Obama complains that some politicians are “just making stuff up” — the public hasn’t been primed to recognize it as the blatantly false and/or hypocritical assertion that it is.

Again, just another case of lies by Democrats that you’re hearing about for the first time. Because they’re lies that the MSNM deems acceptable and not worth pointing out to you, the American public.

Trump Lies More, Obama Lies Better

“But Trump lies more than Obama did”, I can hear some readers objecting. I have several responses to this:

First, granting that Obama lied less, he still lied far too often to be acceptable as a candidate for any public office. Less dishonest isn’t the same as honest. It isn’t even the same as acceptably dishonest. Besides, the MSNM should be catching 100% of the lies told by any president, no matter how many or how few there are. But somehow the MSNM decided to only tally Trump’s myriad lies, rather than Obama’s smaller (and therefore more easily counted) number of falsehoods.

Second, when Obama and fellow Democrats told the “100 year” lie in 2008, did the MSNM have some way of peering seven years into the future to compare that lie to Trump’s lies, which started in 2015 with Trump’s presidential bid? That is, did the MSNM decide to let Obama’s 2008 lie slide because they knew “Trump lies more” would be true in 2015? No, of course not. The MSNM made up their minds to gaslight on Obama’s lies long before they had any inkling of how dishonest Trump the presidential candidate was. “Trump lies more” couldn’t have served as a premise of any argument letting Obama & Co. off the hook for lying in 2008.

(Let’s face it: in deciding whether to overlook his dishonesty, all the MSNM really needed to know was that Obama was a Democrat.)

Third, while Trump lies more, for the most part his lies are immediately challenged and widely exposed to be falsehoods. Democrats, the MSNM and even some members of Trump’s own party openly rebuke him for being dishonest. Meanwhile, Obama over and over managed to get away with lies because he benefitted from a large group of followers — much larger than anything Trump can muster — helping to gaslight. (Seriously, how often has a fellow Democrat ever publicly faulted Obama for being dishonest?)

And those followers and enablers of misbehavior don’t just include insiders such as Samantha Power, Jay Carney and Dan Pfeiffer. No, they include the MSNM, too. Rather than prominently criticizing Obama’s lies, the MSNM routinely downplayed or even ignored them.

Remember that, within six months of Donald Trump claiming he was “fighting corruption” in his Ukraine phone call, the MSNM had investigated every last detail of the call and was reporting 24/7 on Trump’s impeachment. Compare that to the Obama administration’s claim to be improving Medicare’s efficiency and health outcomes with $11 billion in MAQBPDP spending: nearly 10 years later you’d have trouble finding any members of the “facts matter” MSNM who’ve even heard of the bogus program, let alone anyone in the MSNM’s audience who’s heard of it.

Trump’s lies rarely last 48 hours before being overturned; Obama’s lies persist, undebunked, even into the present. Numbers aside, Trump lies poorly, while Obama lies effectively, because he benefits from the MSNM’s gaslighting.

But wait, there’s more: recognize that this article and the timeline I’ve created only focus on the MSNM coverage of one Democrat. There are other prominent Democrats, and other Democrat presidents, and you could just as easily look into whether the coverage of these Democrats suffers from the same appalling lack of balance. You might even find that the MSNM’s unbalanced coverage of Barack Obama was merely an extension of unbalanced coverage stretching years, even decades, prior to Obama’s political career. Wouldn’t that be an underwhelming discovery?

Seriously, if we’re going to insist that Donald Trump is leading us toward some potentially “totalitarian”, “post-truth” world of “fake news” where evidence is ignored, can we at least admit the MSNM had already put us on that path a long, long time ago?

And so ends the bulk of this article. On to the final, impassioned spiel that borders on ranting…

Show Me What Dishonesty Looks Like

This is what dishonesty looks like: withholding information that people deserve to have even though it would be easy for you to give it to them, and despite the fact that you have a professional obligation to give it to them.

(This obligation is particularly pertinent if you work for PBS or NPR, which receive government funding premised on their political programming being unbiased.)

And don’t give me the “omitting the truth isn’t lying” defense. Even if the MSNM’s behavior is not technically the same as lying, it’s wrong for all the same reasons. The “lying VS omitting the truth” distinction is a distinction without a moral difference here.

And look what that “omitting the truth” pattern of behavior does to our politics…

In a democracy, politics should serve to make us better as individual people. It is, after all, the way we collaborate to make decisions alongside people we disagree with while respecting their rights. You’d think we would come out the other end of this process more thoughtful and informed, more empathetic and more connected to the community.

But American politics doesn’t work anything like that, does it?

That’s in large part because there’s so much hypocrisy in American politics. Hypocrisy, political or otherwise, is legitimately infuriating. There are few things that anger us more than being on the losing side of a double standard. It enrages us and makes us less willing to trust whoever is employing the double standard to our disadvantage.

So, Republicans get outraged at the dishonesty of Obama and Democrats — but not at the dishonesty of fellow Republicans such as Trump — while Democrats get outraged at Trump’s dishonesty but not Obama’s. It’s no wonder each side hates and generally mistrusts one another.

And it doesn’t help that the MSNM behaves with all the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party’s opposition research department: dutifully tallying up Trump’s lies while largely ignoring Obama’s. In doing so, the MSNM is influencing elections under the guise of being objective journalists. Actually, the amount of influence their massive, long-standing pattern of misinformation has had (and continues to have) on our politics and our elections — intentional or not — is so extensive it would make Vladimir Putin and Russian military intelligence blush.

This makes the sanctimonious, hypocritical sloganeering of the MSNM — again, intentionally or not — a constant source of antagonism toward those who’ve picked up on the MSNM’s gaslighting. Notice how the MSNM treats us to a never-ending pantheon of sanctimonious, self-congratulatory hype declaring their oh-so-pious objectivity:

• “speaking truth to power”
• “facts first”, “put the facts first” and “facts matter”
• “impartial pursuers of truth”
• “all things considered”
• “the truth is worth it”
• “to create a more informed public”
• “without favoritism”
• “keeping them honest”
• “reliable sources”
• “the most trusted name in news”
• “reflect and represent the various communities we serve”
• “indispensable to a healthy democracy”
• “democracy dies in darkness” (that gem comes from The Washington Post)
• “all the news that’s fit to print” (from The New York Times, the gaslighter of record)
• and (perhaps most ironically, from CNN) “silence is not an option”

These rhetorical mascots are as outlandishly fictitious as the Phillie Phanatic. They’re as laughable as Fox News’ “fair and balanced”, little more than abridged, holier-than-thou lectures coming from the very same MSNM that routinely gaslights on truth and facts, turning out the lights on news that could harm Democrats.

These slogans are not omissions of truth. They are flat out lies.

And these slogans compel a large segment of the American population to believe — correctly — that they can’t get a fair shake from the MSNM. This segment of the population is left properly infuriated, and inclined to fill in the gaps in the MSNM’s reporting by going to places like Fox News and Info Wars. Unfortunately, these outlets have their own infuriating patterns of misinformation (though, to be fair, they sometimes cover legitimate stories that the MSNM barely touch).

More, the MSNM’s dishonesty drives many of these Americans to support any political candidate who calls out that dishonesty, like Newt Gingrich.

And Donald Trump.

(And while I can understand the appeal of “getting back” at the MSNM for repeatedly antagonizing people with their blatant double standards in political reporting, it’s hard to see how voting for Trump actually solves much of anything.)

Thanks to the MSNM, we’ve had (at least) two extraordinarily dishonest presidents in a row: the first, Obama, elected with the help of the MSNM; the second, Trump, elected in part as retaliation for the MSNM’s gaslighting on Obama’s dishonesty.

Don’t Forget the Money

Just to go at this from another perspective, think about it in terms of dollars and cents. The MSNM loves to talk about Donald Trump’s finances. Can we take a moment to consider the financial implications of Obama’s dishonesty and the MSNM gaslighting of it? Whimsically or not, it’s worth some thought:

• How many people have subscribed to news outlets or cable channels on the basis of the (false) belief that they were being provided with unbiased, objective news coverage? Could be a class action suit in there, right? Along the same lines, if your cable company won’t give you the option of a plan that excludes CNN, PBS, MSNBC and the like, maybe you should cancel your subscription, yes?
• How many people have donated money to NPR or PBS — and how many taxpayers have “donated” money to these government-funded news outlets — again having been fooled into believing they were supporting quality political journalism? Maybe some congressional testimony is in order, along with an open discussion of whether NPR and PBS will do the right thing and return some of that money — or have it clawed back — given that they clearly didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. Oh, and uh, maybe let’s defund the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting)?
• How many students racked up debt at schools of journalism that were supposed to teach them how to challenge biased reporting, but if anything seem to have done the opposite?
• How many people gave money to the Democratic Party not knowing — thanks to the MSNM — the full extent of Democrat dishonesty and misbehavior? Money that they otherwise wouldn’t have given?
• How are we going to return the $11 billion spent on MAQBPDP back to the Medicare trust fund? Are taxpayers going to have to foot the full bill for “Obama’s folly”, or could Obama’s 2012 election campaign still have some cash lying around to chip in? It’s a lot of money, sure, but maybe the DNC or Obama’s book publisher could help out…
• Regarding the in-kind contributions made by the MSNM, how exactly should the Democratic Party be listing them on its tax forms? Golly, their assessed value could even be as high as $11 billion or so.

Ultimately, no one should assume that, if Democrats are doing something wrong, the MSNM will catch it and let us know about it. (I’m betting a lot of people both in and out of journalism have been fooled into believing this.) Journalism is broken. “Broken”, as in, the MSNM has done so much for so long to bend over backward and contort their news coverage in favor of Democrats that they’ve ruptured their own spine.

While I don’t agree with every accusation of bias levelled against the MSNM, I agree with enough of them — notably, the ones I’ve laid out myself — to conclude that the MSNM can’t be viewed as a reliable source of political news. They don’t stand in opposition to biased right-wing news media like Fox News and Info Wars by being objective and unbiased; they stand in opposition by having a left-wing bias.

Certainly, the MSNM might do good journalism in other areas, such as outside of politics or in raising the alarm about Republican wrongdoing. But they can’t be counted on to cover Democrats the same way. Given the clemency they repeatedly granted Obama as a political favor for his loyalty to Democratic Party goals, we simply cannot trust the MSNM to give us all the facts and information that we need and deserve to know. This collapse of credibility is the price the “left-wing media machine” pays for the their repeated decisions to crop the scandalous behavior of Democrats out of the political picture.

This is not to say that the MSNM is the “enemy of the people”; that kind of rhetoric is histrionic, derisive and false. It’s also potentially an incitement to violence. But the MSNM is certainly a political ally of Democrats in a way that makes them a political enemy of Republicans. And that means they can’t possibly claim to be playing the role of objective, unbiased, professional journalists.

(The MSNM’s shows investigating the media itself are some of the most ridiculous when it comes to bias: when have you ever heard CNN’s “Reliable Sources” or NPR’s “On the Media” excoriate their own outlets or for creating an “alternate reality” in their news coverage? Real journalists should be embarrassed by these programs.)

So What Now?

I honestly don’t know exactly where we go from here. I’m certain that the MSNM isn’t going to change their ways. They’re hopelessly biased. (Seriously, listen to NPR, notice the massive left-wing tilt, and notice that none of the other MSNM outlets criticize it.) Allegations of this bias have been around for decades, and the MSNM mostly roll their eyes dismissively in response.

Even if this bias is unintentional, it’s still unacceptable and only shows the MSNM to be horribly compromised by confirmation bias and the Dunning–Kruger effect (in which the greater your belief in your own professional expertise, the more likely you’re actually incompetent). This isn’t QAnon or anything ridiculous like that. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy. It’s likely just a culture of the politically like-minded who all know what steps to take to help Democrats, and who go ahead and take those steps. (However, the chronic gaslighting on other misbehavior by the MSNM likely sustains the belief among many people that the MSNM is withholding evidence that proves that QAnon and other conspiracy theories are true.)

To be blunt, a lot of the people covering politics today shouldn’t be in journalism any more than Sean Spicer should be presiding over White House press briefings. Don’t worry about them, though, their jobs are safe. The MSNM will see to that, because the MSNM will never willingly dissect their own bias the way the dissect the bias of Fox News.

What I mean, specifically, is that they’ll never deride themselves for spiking stories or leaving important details out of their reporting the way, say, they deride One America News Network for doing the same thing. They’ll never drag their own political editors-in-chief in front of the cameras and hold them accountable the way the will with Sean Spicer or some other member of Trump’s communications team. They’ll never put their own network anchors in the hot seat and ask them, “How can you possibly defend these decisions to not spotlight these lies and scandals?”. Not now, not ever. There’s just no way the MSNM is going to cop to their mistakes. They won’t expose or criticize the media structure that enables Obama they way they do the media structure that enables Trump.

Again, this is what makes for persistent antagonism: the MSNM bills themselves as gatekeepers of truth while routinely playing down massive amounts of dishonesty so long as it comes from Democrats. They point out and even lament the polarization of American politics even as they’re acting as one of the main contributors to it.

Maybe a boycott would succeed in forcing them to change, though I’m not necessarily a fan of that tactic or optimistic about its success. But then again, what other option is there? I’m open to suggestions. (If you are going to boycott, be polite about it. One of my misgivings about boycotts is that they can descend into collective bullying, demonizing and name-calling.)

The MSNM is correct that we need unbiased sources of political news for our democracy to function properly. However, they’re tragically, even comically mistaken to think that they’re the ones to supply it. When presented with the facts about Democrats, the MSNM has a habit of “just running away”.

The disgusting dishonesty of Barack Obama and the MSNM is every bit as unacceptable as the disgusting dishonesty of Donald Trump. All of it needs to go, and the MSNM, ideally, should be the one leading that effort with integrity and without partisanship.

(As an aside, nonpartisanship is a necessary condition for the MSNM to lead our public debate, but it’s not sufficient. At the very least, they’d also need to develop the conceptual clarity to identify and distinguish between different forms of uncivil or otherwise extraneous rhetoric, such as name-calling VS ad hominem reasoning VS vulgarity (no, they’re not the same; they’re three different things that sometimes overlap). That way, they could call out this misbehavior and educate the American public about it (something I once unsuccessfully took a swing at with the Civil Debate Page). But the MSNM has never demonstrated this conceptual clarity. Even on something as easy to spot as ad hominem reasoning, the MSNM has been woefully inept. How many times has the term “politically motivated” popped up in the news with nary a whiff of the appropriate critical analysis of the term from the MSNM? Avoiding ad hominem reasoning is one of the most basic norms of logic. The MSNM’s habitual inability to point out this most rudimentary of errors in reasoning further demonstrates how horribly ill-equipped the MSNM is to be in the business of promoting fact-based debate.)

The news media as currently constituted isn’t going to lead us toward unbiased news and civil debate. Fox News and company — the right-wing media — are not going to provide that for us, and neither will their left-wing counterpart, the MSNM. We’re going to have to piece it together without either of them.

One way or another, our news media has to change, and we have to be the ones to change it.