The Press as the Enemy

Last week, the Washington Post attacked Nikki Haley for not taking the Confederate flag down at the South Carolina State Capitol.

You will recall that after the tragic 2015 shooting in Charleston, SC, wherein Dylan Roof murdered congregants at the Emanuel AME Church, Nikki Haley led the charge to take down the Confederate flag. The attack was premised on Haley not doing it sooner and, in her first campaign, assuring South Carolinians she would not pursue the issue.

The Washington Post ignored that Republicans, on the campaign trail during Haley’s 2010 gubernatorial bid, accused her of being a whore and a transplant from India. Those were actual allegations against her by her own side. She won.

She won, in part, by assuring South Carolinians that they could take a chance on her and she would not be disruptive but was one of them. It worked. She won. The Post ignores all that context to say Haley could have, had she wanted, taken on the issue in 2010. They ignore that she might not have won if she proved to be a more disrupting force than she already was.

The context matters. The context of the race, the state, etc. matters. The Washington Post never did a story about how Barack Obama campaigned against gay marriage only to push it in office. They never did a story about how he could have pushed harder on the campaign trail in 2008. But they went there with Haley because she is a Republican and they hate her for it.

In Florida, last week, NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen vented that Ron DeSantis refused to take questions from the crowd at an event. In the same tweet, Allen noted that DeSantis instead chose to mingle and visit one-on-one with the audience. In other words, DeSantis answered questions from people, just not the way Allen wanted.

Today, Allen is at it again. He accuses DeSantis of embracing the Florida “swamp” that he claimed he’d transform. Instead, in his latest NBC News rant, Allen claims DeSantis did not reform the culture of politics in Florida but used it to his own advantage.

Allen and NBC News will not tell you that Jonathan Allen, their reporter, had been an employee of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s political operation. He left Politico for the job but eventually went back to Politico where the progressive spin-meisters waved it all away and claimed it was no big deal. Notably, the man who waved it all away for Allen, is John Harris, Politico’s Editor, whose wife was the Executive Director of NARAL before working for a Democrat in Congress.

Nope, no bias at all.

Allen left Politico, went to NBC News, and no one bothers to tell us he worked for Flordia Democrat Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz before turning his pen against Ron DeSantis.

The press really is the enemy of the GOP more and more. They would not put up with these antics from Republicans. By the way, it is worth noting that CNN had Valerie Jarrett’s daughter on the payroll as an anchor, but she too, is at NBC now.

Perhaps it is more NBC News is the enemy. With MSNBC at least, it is becoming the network most likely to hire Democrat partisans and weaponize them against the right behind the veneer of claims of nonpartisanship.

The GOP would be wise to avoid giving NBC a debate or even dealing with NBC journalists at this point. The network is weaponized against them.