So What's the Excuse for Media Bias Now?

Duane Patterson 12:40 PM | June 02, 2025
Townhall Media

Alex Thompson tried to explain away left-wing media bias last week on a Free Press podcast with Bari Weiss as part of his two-week long tour with Jake Tapper to promote Original Sin. 

It wasn't ideological bias, he wants you to believe. Oh, sure, there are people within the Manhattan-Beltway media complex who are Democrats, to be certain, but that had nothing to do with why they failed to press the issue of Former President Joe Biden not being fit for office on the 2020 campaign trail when the signs were clearly there. And that doesn't even take into account the dozens upon dozens of examples of Biden slipping his cognitive transmission between 2nd and 3rd gears during his four-year regency.

No, Thompson argues, it wasn't ideological bias. It was concern that we in media would lose our sources. The party in power would be mad at us, and other media outlets would be mad at us, and we'd be shunned. 

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Chuck Todd, formerly of NBC News and its Sunday news program, Meet the Press, continued his attempt at pulling a Jedi mind trick so ambitious as to make the Late Sir Alec Guinness blush. This was with Piers Morgan late last week. 

Jake Tapper, Thompson's Original Sin co-author and CNN anchor would have you believe he hates both parties and didn't vote for either one of them. 

You don't have to vote, or in Tapper's stated case, stand either party to have ideological leanings impact your reporting. Lord knows there are plenty of Never Trumpers who claim the entire conservative movement has lost their collective minds and fallen prey to Donald Trump's cult of personality. They can't stand the current Republican Party, but at least several Never Trumpers still hold to what can generally be agreed to as conservative principles. 

Jake Tapper can be mad as he wants at the current roster of Democrats leading the party, but it simply defies credulity to believe anything other than he leans to the left, and puts his thumb on the scale when deciding whether or how hard to push on a story lead. 

Just for the sake of argument, let's give Tapper, Thompson, and Todd their premise. They're not biased. It's just those gosh darned lying liar Democrats, all of them, lied their lying pants off to us. If that's so, then what is their excuse for how the Beltway Bubble covers stories now, especially if they don't necessarily have anything to do with who was running the country in a politburo? 

I have a handful of examples from over the weekend to help ascertain whether this newfound promise of Beltway journos to not be suckered by the lies any longer, to get back to dogged reporting and chasing the truth wherever it may be lurking, is happening or not.

We'll start with the very serious, and move to the relatively silly, and then back to very serious. All are illustrative to my proposition that media is still gaslighting you and has not changed a bit about what they cover and how they cover it. 

The Trump administration, along with the Israeli government, organized a new way of providing food and other relief into the Gaza Strip, hopefully bypassing Hamas entirely and getting aid directly to the Palestinians who need it. Hamas, which still operates all of the propaganda coming out of the Strip, came up with another blood libel on Israel, that 20-plus people will killed in cold blood by IDF soldiers at one of these new aid stations. This is the headline from the New York Times. 

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More Than 20 Killed Near Aid Distribution Site in Gaza, Health Officials Say

The Times was not the only outlet to repeat the Hamas Health Ministry talking points verbatim. So did CNN and the BBC.

The Washington Post was no better. 

There are two ideological viewpoints - varying gradations of progressivism on the left, and the same for conservatism on the right. Are there currently voices on the right that are anti-Israel and/or antisemitic? Sure. They are very few, and they are pariahs, especially on this issue, within the Republican Party apparatus, as they should be. Can the same be said for the Democratic Party? No. Whether it's members of the Squad in the House Democratic Caucus, or in academia, the Jew hatred that's been increasing at a disturbing level the last five years has been entirely on the left. In this case, the Times, CNN, and BBC are reflecting that virulent leftist worldview without pushing back or voicing objectivity. They didn't question the information they are getting from Hamas. What they wrote is no different than what Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Rashida Tlaib would say in a press conference. So if there's no media bias, why the thumb on the scale against Israel every single time? 

Of course, being that Hamas was behind the accusation in the first place, you know what was coming next, right? Outing the accusation as the lie it was from the onset. From Former Ambassador to Israel David Friedman:

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The IDF even released security footage for the time the alleged massacre took place. 

It simply did not happen. Media were lied to again by Hamas, after being lied to hundreds of times since the October 7th attack, an attack that actually was a massacre, and yet media still falls for the lie. If it is not due to an ideological kinship with the anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party, what else explains the same mistakes in editorial judgment and coverage over and over again? 

Even CNN, Jake Tapper's network, had to retract their original reportage. 


What do you want to bet Tapper's apology tour the last couple weeks, including promises he'll do better, won't extend to covering this story for what it was, intentional misinformation and libel, and get to the bottom of how his network, along with so many others, got willingly duped once again?

On the night of Inauguration Day, at the last rally of the evening held inside the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., Elon Musk came out to a thunderous ovation and patted his heart and extended his arm to the crowd. Instantly, it was branded a Nazi salute, and Beltway media was all over it. 



Saturday night in Anaheim, California, as part of a California Democratic Party conference, New Jersey Senator Cory 'Spartacus' Booker was the keynote speaker, and felt the love of his fellow Volksgenosse. 

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Has the Beltway media, being they're not biased and all, done the same seizing and pouncing to Booker that they did with Musk? Why, no. In fact, in one of the few places that even mentioned the Herr Booker controversy, Newsweek, this was their headline. 

MAGA Accuses Democratic Senator Cory Booker of Doing 'Nazi Salute'

Not whether or not he did the Seig Heil (which according to the rule media set in late January, he clearly did), but the story is that MAGA is accusing Booker, meaning Booker is looked upon as the victim. 

How did Tapper fare during the blitzkrieg of media coverage over Elon Musk's gesture? 

Tapper let Senator Chris Murphy all but call Musk a Nazi before offering his own hand gesture and the half-hearted disclaimer. He said, "Just for whatever it's worth..." before saying the Trump team denies what the gesture meant. If you begin a sentence saying 'for whatever it's worth', you're telling your audience that we all know the Trump team lies about everything, they're probably lying here, too, and he doesn't believe them, either. So it's hardly a disclaimer. But how has Tapper reacted thus far to the Booker controversy?

To be fair, he wasn't tapped to host CNN's Sunday show, State of the Union. It was Dana Bash's turn. As a baseline, how did she handle the Musk gesture in January? 

She brought on Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. 

Yesterday, Bash was in the host chair again, and had every opportunity to give Booker the same treatment she gave Musk. She brought on the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries. Did she bring up the subject at all? Ask for a response? Nope. 

Two segments later, Bash brought in the aforementioned Senator Murphy, who is being eyed as a potential primary challenger of Booker in 2028 for the presidential nomination. Murphy had no problem getting in front of his skis with Musk. Did Bash give the opportunity to Murphy to hammer Booker? Nope. The only topics that came up were disagreements they had with the Trump administration on the budget bill and foreign policy. She was teeing up softballs. 

Finally, back to the very serious. Sunday saw another vicious terrorist attack aimed specifically at Jews and those who support the state of Israel. This time, it was Molotov cocktails thrown at a pro-Israel walk/rally in Boulder, CO. 

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Among those burned alive? Kids. 

We won't know the full extent of casualties for a while, but there were several that suffered burns. The terrorist has been arrested and identified. He's about what you would expect. 

Dan Bongino and Kash Patel at FBI have indicated this is being investigated as a targeted terror attack, which it obviously is. Boulder Police are hesitant to go that far, being that they're, well, Boulder. 

How did the New York Times write this one up? 

Police Respond to Attack at a Colorado Event Raising Awareness of Israeli Hostages -

A joint statement from the Jewish community in Boulder, Colo., said that an “incendiary device” was thrown at walkers at the event.

By the way, as of Sunday afternoon, you had to do a search on their website to even find this story. The propaganda piece by the Hamas Health Ministry blood libeling the IDF of killing 20 people at the aid facility? That's still up, front page, un-retracted. 

By the time you read this column, we will know the pith of this terrorist in Colorado's gist. It seems pretty apparent from his screed caught on cellphones that he's not a fan of Jews, Israel, or for that matter, the United States. He threw a Molotov cocktail at a crowd that included families, parents and kids, because he figured it was only fair to burn kids alive here after what he perceives is happening in Gaza. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this terrorist did not wear a red MAGA hat at a Trump rally anytime recently. 

How much airtime do you think MSNBC and CNN will give this story today? Do you think Tapper will devote any time to this, or to the toxic, inflammatory rhetoric by the antisemitic wing of the Democratic Party in the same way media treats Republicans whenever there's the slightest chance someone on the far right fringe snaps? 

The reason we can presume that media will, as David Burge, @IowaHawkBlog on X famously says, smother this story with a pillow until it quits moving is because Fox News' Bill Melugin, an actual reporter, has already got the 411 on the subhuman who threw a couple firebombs into a crowd. 

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Illegal immigrant on a visa overstay bringing global jihad to Boulder, you say? That's the end of that story if you're employed at CNN or MSNBC. Cannot wait for Colorado Senator Michael Bennet's CODEL to Egypt to try to spring his constituent free from prison in a few weeks. 

Don't tell me there is no media bias. There is good reporting in Original Sin, but it is far from complete reporting. It's C-Y-A reportage, and ignores the aiding, abetting, and culpability of the media. And the next time a member of the media tells you there's no bias, excusing away every instance of an ideological slant always leftward, be it promotion or protection, know you're being gaslit. 


One can flip a coin enough times, and the result will average out to 50/50. When it comes to media and their news judgment and/or performance in covering stories, it would be a lot easier to buy their claim of having no institutional bias if the coin flip didn't come up donkey's tail every single time. 

Tags: ANTISEMITISM CORY BOOKER JAKE TAPPER MEDIA BIAS MEDIA GASLIGHTING

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