By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
The mainstream media — that is, the liberal media — share
all the views and characteristics of the Left. Among these is the Left’s view
of truth. There are honest individuals with left-wing views and dishonest
individuals on the right. But truth is not a leftist value. Everything the Left
believes in is more important than truth — social justice, economic equality,
reducing carbon emissions, expanding the power of the state, battling sexism,
homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and above all of these, destroying its
conservative opposition.
The media’s coverage of President Barack Obama’s
nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court should serve as one of
the most blatant examples of both the left-wing orientation of the news media
and their willingness to play with truth.
On March 16, the day after Garland’s nomination, every
major mainstream news outlet, print and electronic, depicted the judge as a
“centrist.”
New York Times
front page, first sentence:
“WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday nominated
Merrick B. Garland to be the nation’s 113th Supreme Court justice, choosing a
centrist appellate judge . . . ”
Los Angeles Times
front-page headline:
“Obama’s choice of popular centrist Merrick Garland for
Supreme Court puts GOP to the test”
USA Today
headline:
“Who Is Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Supreme Court
Nominee?”
The answer? “By all accounts, Garland appears to be a
safe (that is to say, centrist) choice by Obama.”
Washington Post
headline:
“Merrick Garland’s instinct for the middle could put him
in the court’s most influential spot”
“Garland’s deep résumé and centrist reputation appear to
have positioned him well to earn the president’s nod.”
Two days later, the Los
Angeles Times featured a “news analysis” on its front page, in which its
reporter wrote:
“Judge Merrick Garland may well be the most moderate
Supreme Court nominee anyone could expect from a Democratic president . . . a
superbly qualified judge with a cautious, centrist record. . . . ”
There is no truth to any of these reports — something
easily proved by both Judge Garland’s decisions and, amazingly, by the
newspapers’ reports themselves.
Take the Los
Angeles Times’ front page “news analysis,” for example. After describing
the judge as moderate and centrist, the Times
reporter writes:
“If the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative,
is replaced by a moderate-to-liberal Justice Garland, the court would tip to
the left on several key issues, like abortion, affirmative action, the death
penalty, gun control, campaign spending, immigration and environmental
protection.”
In other words, the very same author who describes Judge
Garland as centrist notes that Garland votes Left on essentially every major
issue confronting the nation and the Supreme Court.
The very same day the New
York Times led by calling Garland is a centrist, it published an article on
the nomination in which it noted that, “If Judge Garland is confirmed, he could
tip the ideological balance to create the most liberal Supreme Court in 50
years.”
Moreover, in reviewing Garland’s decisions, the piece
placed Judge Garland to the left of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, way to
the left of Justice Stephen Breyer, and minimally to the right of Justices
Sotomayor and Ginsburg.
By their own accounts, the liberal media lied in
describing Garland as a centrist.
And the more research one does, the bigger this lie
becomes.
In a column in the Wall
Street Journal, Juanita Duggan, president and CEO of the National
Federation of Independent Business, writes that Garland is so anti-small
business and so pro-big labor, that, “This is the first time in the NFIB’s
73-year history that we will weigh in on a Supreme Court nominee.”
She explains, for example, that, “In 16 major labor
decisions of Judge Garland’s that we examined, he ruled 16-0 in favor of the
NLRB [National Labor Relations Board].”
Elsewhere in the Journal,
the editorial board wrote of Garland:
“We can’t think of a single issue that has divided the
Court on which Mr. Garland would reliably vote differently from the four
liberal Justices already on the bench.”
And this: “Scotusblog’s Tom Goldstein points out that Mr.
Garland has strong views on agency deference” and “in a dozen close cases in
which the court divided, he sided with the [EPA] every time.”
And finally (from Scotusblog):
“Judge Garland would be a reliable fifth vote on all of these legal issues.”
Those issues? All the fundamental issues that divide Left
from Right.
So, the entire Left is lying about Judge Garland, who,
for the record, seems like a truly decent man who possesses a first-class mind.
They do so because getting a fifth left-wing vote and weakening the Republicans
are far more important than truth.
And, believe it or not, there is an even worse lesson
here, namely the media’s effectiveness in saturating society with its
mendacious version of reality. Unless an American makes the effort to study the
issue — and most do not — they take the news media’s version as truth. The
terrible lesson — affirmed time and time again since the 1960s — is that a free
society can experience brainwashing as effectively as a totalitarian state.
The reporting on Garland is that false.
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