The Patriot Post® · The Paul Pelosi Attack: Why the Media Cover-Up?

“Journalism,” quipped political observer David Burge some years ago, “is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” And nowhere is that sentiment more spot-on than with the reporting surrounding the attack on Paul Pelosi.

Just ask NBC News national correspondent Miguel Almaguer, who on November 4 on the “Today” show reported some inconvenient details about the attack, apparently based on information he’d received from a source who’d seen the as-yet unreleased body cam footage: that police didn’t know they were responding to the Pelosi residence; that Pelosi opened the door for police; that Pelosi didn’t attempt to escape or declare an emergency; and that Pelosi actually walked away from the cops and back toward DePape, who then attacked him with a hammer.

Almaguer’s report was yanked down almost immediately, and he hasn’t been on the air since. Why might that be? The network says Almaguer’s report didn’t meet its journalistic standards. But what standards are those? It seems to us that Almaguer’s offense was to have engaged in journalism. As Fox News reports:

The ordeal has puzzled NBC News insiders, with some believing the report was squashed because it went against the mainstream narrative. A former senior NBC News executive who worked with Almaguer believes the network needs to explain what’s going on.

“NBC News must be more transparent with its viewers about this error. Who wrote Miguel’s script? Who approved the script? Are he and his producers suspended during an internal investigation? NBC’s silence on this matter speaks volumes. NBC owes it to its audience to be truthful and not cover this up,” the former executive said.

Let’s face it: When you get suckered into spinning phony yarns about Donald Trump colluding with Russia, you win Pulitzer Prizes. But when you happen to uncover inconvenient truths that contradict the prevailing leftist narrative, you get disappeared.

The Leftmedia directive seems to be: Don’t ask, don’t tell. But someone forgot to inform KNTV San Francisco’s Bigad Shiban, who earlier this week went on air with a report that supported Almaguer’s earlier reporting — once again, based on information from a source who’d seen the body cam footage.

Why this discrepancy between the national news reports and the local ones? And why are the federal indictment and the San Francisco indictment in direct conflict with each other regarding such basic facts as whether the cops opened the door or Paul Pelosi did? What’s telling here is the level of detail in the local reporting, which notes not just that Pelosi opened the door but that he did so with his left hand. That degree of detail can only be provided by someone who was at the scene or has seen the body cam footage.

So: Why does the Biden Justice Department’s indictment say that the cops opened the door when it seems clear that the body cam footage proves otherwise?

Said Shiban: “We reached out to the Department of Justice for an explanation of its differing account of this seemingly innocuous issue of who opened the door, but so far, we have not heard back.”

If we were Shiban, we wouldn’t hold our breath. The Democrats and their mainstream media allies clearly want to smother the details of this story beneath a pillow. Doing so, though, will naturally fuel doubts about what really happened. In any case, it seems to us that this first draft of history is in need of a good fact-checking.

When this story first broke, we pushed back against the Democrat-Leftmedia complex and its bizarre and widespread assertion that the alleged assailant, David DePape — a homeless, nudist, drug-addled, anti-Semitic, BLM-supporting, rainbow flag-flying, illegal alien Berkeleyite — is cut from the same cloth as the Capitol rioters of January 6, 2021.

Equally ridiculous and equally worthy of our scorn was the Olympian leap required to connect DePape with certain January 6 rioters because they both carried zip ties. And because DePape allegedly said, “Where’s Nancy?”

Yet that’s as far as we went. The attack on 82-year-old Paul Pelosi was awful, and we didn’t have all the facts — and we still don’t — so we weren’t inclined to get out over our skis about what the assailant was doing there and why.

Now, though, we have clearly conflicting news reports about what happened at the Pelosi residence, as well as contradictory language in the federal and local indictments. And above all, we have a corporate media that seems more interested in silencing its journalists than getting to the whole truth of the matter. That, to us, is worth reporting.

And they wonder why no one trusts the news anymore.