The mainstream media claimed that Donald Trump colluded with Russia. It claimed the Steele dossier was loaded with incriminating evidence that would bury Trump. The Washington Post and The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting… but it was all wrong.

There was no collusion. The Steele dossier was filled with uncorroborated information that was later debunked by our intelligence agencies, something that was hidden from the American people until well after the fact.

The media laughed at President Trump when he claimed the COVID-19 virus was leaked out of a lab in Wuhan. He was called a racist and xenophobe for calling it the “China virus.” Well, after Trump left office, we learned the theory was credible, and hardly the conspiracy that the media convinced Americans it was.

One outlet that reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the New York Post, was mocked and ridiculed for its reporting, except by Fox News. Only after 51 intelligence officers claimed it had all the signs of Russian disinformation and Biden used it to debunk Trump’s attacks during the campaign, did they actually investigate and report that it was real.

Then the media told us that President Joe Biden was the “best Biden ever.” Jake Tapper sat feet away from Joe Biden during an interview, and instead of asking hard-hitting questions, slobbered over him like a St. Bernard. It was only after Joe Biden left office that Tapper wrote an “explosive” investigative book revealing Biden’s mental decline.

Today, we learned that the editor of a newsletter from Mediaite, Colby Hall, a newsletter that promised to come “complete with insider knowledge and smart takes,” was filled with misattributions and fabricated quotes. This is an institution that dares to lecture the American people, more specifically conservatives, about misinformation, yet it continuously proves to be its largest producer.

Fabrications and Anonymous Sources

I have been covering politics since 2015, and my longtime readers know there is one thing that drives me insane when it comes to reporting: anonymous sources. If your source is not willing to go on the record, in my opinion, it is not a source worth citing.

I am not talking about background information or a random comment on an existing report, but “the” source that drives the report. To me, this is akin to hanging around the water cooler and reporting Monday morning gossip as a breaking story.

When the One Sheet newsletter was introduced, it was touted as:

“One Sheet will be led by Mediaite Founding Editor Colby Hall [who] will be bringing his unique brand of thoughtful, intelligent, pulls-no-punches analysis to a platform that couldn’t fit him more perfectly.”

Now, if you have read Mediaite, you already know the reporting is sloppy and amateurish at best, so expectations were not very high in terms of quality for this newsletter, yet it still underdelivered.

Hall tried to blame the mistakes on AI, but Mediaite editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo pushed back. According to a Breitbart report, he stated:

“We presented the findings to Colby Hall, who insists the errors were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the use of AI. Regardless, it is completely unacceptable and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation.”

The floodgates on this opened when Status claimed that Hall made up a quote and attributed it to its executive editor, Jon Passantino. Status told Semafor that One Sheet:

“Appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.”

Sadly, this is just one in a long line of fabrications or sloppy reporting that seem more like the norm than the exception in today’s media.

Debunked Stories

In 2018, The New York Times and Washington Post were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage" on Russian interference and "its connections to the Trump campaign."

Much of the reporting at the time centered around the Steele dossier. Had the journalists had any real sources inside the FBI, they would have known the report had already been debunked, yet it was still being used for FISA reports and to drive the investigation, not to mention the reporting.

Between the Robert Mueller and John Durham probes, and later, an Inspector General’s report, the narrative was debunked. Trump requested that the Pulitzers be revoked, but the board refused. The New York Times reported the response:

“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes… The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in national reporting stand.”

How the board came to that conclusion, considering the FEC fined the Clinton campaign and the DNC a total of $113,000 for disguising its payments, as was reported by Politico, not to mention the Durham probe finding that the dossier "relied heavily on Russian disinformation" for its conclusions, is hard to fathom. This is akin to me using a comic book to report on alien life forms living on our planet. The most prestigious award in journalism was given for what amounted to be a work of fiction.

On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation regarding a meeting with a Russian investment fund. The story was false, and the BBC reported that three CNN journalists resigned as a result. CNN retracted the story, to which Trump responded:

"FAKE NEWS! Wow, CNN had to retract big story on 'Russia,' with 3 employees forced to resign.”

On December 1, 2017, ABC News reported that “Flynn prepared to testify that Trump directed him to contact Russians about ISIS.”

On December, 3, 2017, BBC reported that the reporter on the story, Brian Ross, had been suspended because he had the details of the story wrong. The contact happened during the transition period, which was perfectly legal and normal for an incoming administration.

Two major networks. Two false stories. Two corrections that came after the damage was done. And as we all know, first blood gets the coverage. Nobody cares about the Band-Aid that is put on after the fact.

There are a host of other stories that were just outright wrong, such as the Nick Sandmann story, which resulted in massive lawsuits against multiple publications. There was the Jussie Smollett case, which wound up being a hoax, and as we mentioned above, the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as the COVID lab leak theory.

The Biden Mental Decline Cover-Up

Then there is the worst cover-up in presidential history that was guilt by omission: the Biden mental decline.

When I started reporting on Biden’s mental decline, it was sort of a joke at first, making fun of Biden’s gaffes, which he was known for, but then it became very serious.

Biden was having problems, and considering this man had our nuclear codes within arm’s reach, it was no longer funny. Those pregnant pauses became worse, the slips and falls, the confusion of names. I have been around people with dementia, and the signs were all too clear. At worst, the media should have been asking very serious questions, but instead, it chose to push a deep-fake narrative, which was a talking point of the administration.

As the narrative on the right grew, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blasted conservatives and right-wing media outlets, stating:

"I've said it for years now, he's cogent. But I undersold it when I said he was cogent, he's far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been, intellectually, analytically, because he's been around for 50 years. Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And f-you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever."

After the debate, Scarborough claimed ignorance of having seen any bad moments of Biden’s, but that is just a lie. If I saw them, he had to see them. Biden shaking hands with a ghost. Biden addressing a dead congresswoman at an event. Scarborough continued to defend himself, telling Mark Halperin:

“He stumbled and bumbled around, Mark. I mean, yeah, he certainly did. Donald Trump did, other politicians did, and it’s actually the same case as a lot of times when I’ve gone in and talked to Donald Trump. We go on to Donald Trump, and I’ve heard the media narrative around Donald Trump, and certainly I’ve been very critical of Donald Trump, and when I leave, I have a better understanding, just like Jeffrey Goldberg did a couple of weeks ago, a better understanding of where Donald Trump is mentally, if Donald Trump is losing it, like people have said through the years or not."

He continued:

"And so again, am I going to look at a clip that’s gone viral and pay more attention to that than two and a half, three hours I had with a guy one-on-one going around the world? No, I’m just not going to. Are some of the clips bad? Yeah, they certainly are bad."

He then added:

"Put into proper context, I'm just not going to freak out and melt down on one or two clips here and there. And again he bumbled around, and he stumbled around, but he has for quite some time. That didn't seem to me to get in the way of Joe Biden being able to analyze the most important issues."

Just admit you got it wrong. Is it that hard to swallow that pill?

Think about the narrative of Biden officials. For instance, on Meet the Press, Secretary Mayorkas stated:

"The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented."

How many times did we hear that Biden was “sharp as a tack,” or Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tell us that Biden ran circles around everyone in the office? The man shuffled his feet when he walked, yet he was running circles around everyone? We are not stupid!

When Lara Trump was being interviewed by Jake Tapper, she raised the issue of Biden’s mental decline, and Tapper shut her down, accusing her of “mocking his stutter.” This is the same man who, within weeks of Biden leaving office, had somehow managed to write a book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," about Biden’s decline, expecting a pat on the back for his hard investigative work.

Tapper did not just call her out; he was combative about it, as you can see in the video below…

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt commented on the cover-up, stating:

"There was one of the greatest cover-ups and, frankly, political scandals this nation has ever seen. It's been unraveled in some recent books that are being written by journalists who engaged in that cover-up."

The National Review also commented, reporting:

“Almost everyone in the Washington press corps knew... but knew full well the consequences of pursuing that in their reporting."

The table below is a more detailed look at the before and after of outright media lies to the American people:

The freedom of the press is protected in our First Amendment, but with that protection comes a duty… a duty to tell the American people the unbiased truth.

I am a conservative, and I am a constitutionalist, but my loyalty is not to conservatives; it is to the truth. I do my best to report that truth, even when there are times that I hate what I have to write because I know it hurts the conservative cause. I am not an echo chamber. The fact is, as a journalist, my duty is to ensure that my readers get the full picture, not a biased picture through a narrow lens.

Sadly, today’s mainstream media is nothing more than a glorified talk show or gossip column. These so-called journalists have become another wing of the Democrat propaganda machine, and many conservative outlets are no better. People like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity are not journalists; they are cheerleaders.

The American people deserve better than this. They deserve journalists who report what happened, not what they wish had happened.

Gallup reports that trust in the media is at a five-decade low. The media will blame social media, misinformation, and partisan attacks for that number. They are wrong. They own this number. They built it, story by fabricated story, omission by deliberate omission, cover-up by calculated cover-up, anonymous source by anonymous source. The press was not attacked into irrelevance. It lied its way there. The mistrust by the American people, well, it is deserved.

Just look at the table above. Look at every narrative and ask yourself a simple question: "Who benefited from this?" The answer is always the same... Democrats.

The Founders protected the press so it could hold power accountable. They never imagined the press would become the power that needed to be held accountable.