The 2020 presidential election was at best tainted. Was it “stolen”? That depends on what you mean. We’ve argued from the beginning that Democrats undermined the integrity of the election with pandemic-justified changes to election law, such as growing Election Day into election season and greatly expanding bulk-mail voting. Big Tech and Big Media suppressed damning news about Joe Biden’s corruption, censored conservatives, and harangued President Donald Trump.

That last part fed the fact that Trump was utterly hated by millions of Americans. Given the election rules, the pandemic, the shattered (but recovering) economy, and the leftist derangement over Trump personally, it’s no wonder Biden won by promising moderate stability.

Heh.

Yet Trump and his legal team, and a lot of Americans, argued and many continue to believe that vote-counting machines and/or software changed the results of the presidential contest. It was stolen and rigged, they insisted, because Trump got more votes than any GOP candidate ever, improved upon his 2016 vote tally, and, well, he just couldn’t possibly have lost fair and square.

The allegation of rigging and stealing was soon labeled by the Leftmedia, without a hint of self-awareness, as “the Big Lie.” We’ll come back to that.

Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic eventually filed massive defamation lawsuits against Fox News (and others) for allowing allegations about vote-counting shenanigans on-air in the weeks after the election. Newly released findings in the Dominion trial reveal that most Fox News personalities either did not believe or seriously doubted those allegations even while reporting them or featuring guests like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani who espoused them.

The plaintiffs aim to prove that Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and others knew better but chose ratings and profit over the truth. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox and other media properties, arguably admitted as much in depositions. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight,” he said.

Other quotes from Fox personalities were even more damning. Hannity said on November 11, 2020, that “Rudy [was] acting like an insane person.” On November 16, Carlson told his producer, “Sidney Powell is lying.” He also challenged her on-air to produce evidence. She didn’t.

This whole thing definitely damages the credibility of Fox News, though that’s different from Dominion or Smartmatic actually winning a defamation suit.

Your team here at The Patriot Post was always skeptical of the voting machine claims, and we generally steered clear of the story for that reason. In our estimation, chasing down what certainly seems to have been utterly false charges distracted too many people from the real fraud and rigging we began this article by recounting.

In any case, the lawsuit will play out in court, and that’s not even really the point here.

Aside from the aforementioned distractions from the real problems with election integrity, there’s the media angle itself. While Fox damaged its own credibility, its competitors hardly covered themselves in glory.

Yes, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN can all have their fun at Fox’s expense.

But remember who we’re talking about here.

Those three outlets and every other one that’s part of the Democrat super PAC we call the Leftmedia spent years peddling fabricated and fake news about Trump colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election. We’ll illustrate by changing a couple of key words in the Times’s coverage of the Dominion case: “The people running the country’s [largest newspapers] knew [Mrs. Clinton’s] claims of [Russian collusion] in the [2016] election were false but [printed] them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.”

Both the Post and the Times use the terms “election falsehoods” in their headlines about Fox and Dominion. The same can be said of nearly every story they ran about the 2016 election.

They also spent years pushing false information about the coronavirus pandemic, from lockdowns to masking to vaccine effectiveness and mandates to where the whole Wuhan flu got started. They now routinely tell us that men are women simply because the man says so. (Unfortunately, Fox News does this too.) That’s gaslighting of the worst sort.

We could go on (and on and on), but you get the gist. The Times, the Post, and CNN are part of a cabal of Democrat propagandists. The Leftmedia peddles lies deliberately and always. Fox News was a little too slow to stop one for a few weeks.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” lamented Fox’s Bill Sammon.

What would it take for the mainstream media in America to honestly report the facts and the truth, regardless of which party was harmed or benefited? Fake news isn’t exactly a new problem, though. As Thomas Jefferson complained way back in 1802, “Newspapers … serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.” Some things never change.