The Patriot Post® · And the Pulitzer for Fake News Goes To...

Say you’re on the editorial board at The New York Times or The Washington Post. And say you lie for a living. But we repeat ourselves.

Somewhat lost amid the indignation over Monday’s devastating Durham report, which focused mostly on the corruption within the FBI, was the rotten role of the mainstream press in all this. And placed neatly atop this dung heap of deceit, this monument to media malfeasance, are the twin Pulitzer Prizes for National Reporting that were awarded to The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2018 for their complicity in the Crossfire Hurricane operation more accurately known as the Clinton-engineered, Obama-enabled, FBI-executed Trump/Russia collusion hoax.

So shabby was the reporting that earned these two Trump-hating “news” organizations their Pulitzers, it might just as well have been written by Baghdad Bob or Joe Isuzu.

And sadly, but not surprisingly, both the Post and the Times are unrepentant. We know this because they’ve yet to return those tarnished Pulitzers, and because their coverage of the release of the Durham report speaks volumes.

Where the Post is concerned, we don’t even have to read beyond the first paragraph penned by its editorial board:

John Durham has at long last released his report on the FBI’s 2016 Russia probe, which conservative conspiracy theorists once anticipated would expose a “deep state” scheme to undermine then-candidate Donald Trump. But, despite some commentators’ efforts to portray the actual result of the four-year investigation as damning, the reality is that the Justice Department special counsel uncovered next to nothing.

“Next to nothing,” that is, except that the FBI is corrupt, the Democrat Party is dirty, and Donald Trump and his staffers are innocent of the charges that they colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. “Next to nothing” other than the deep state interfered in the 2016 election and provided the template for doing so again in 2020. “Next to nothing” besides the fact that Trump’s early presidency was hamstrung by a partisan investigation begun on totally false pretenses.

Not to be outdone, the Times’s Charlie Savage, who seems to be a surrogate for the paper’s MIA editorial board, led with a nakedly false headline: “After Years of Political Hype, the Durham Inquiry Failed to Deliver.” He followed that with a subhead soup of non sequiturs: “A dysfunctional investigation led by a Trump-era special counsel illustrates a dilemma about prosecutorial independence and accountability in politically sensitive matters.”

Nothing to see here, say the well-paid liars at the Post and the Times. Kindly move along, you smelly Walmart Trumpers.

Last summer, as our Nate Jackson reported, Donald Trump asked the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind these two awards. As Trump rightly pointed out, “The coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce which attempted to spin a false narrative that my campaign supposedly colluded with Russia despite a complete lack of evidence underpinning this allegation.”

No dice, said the Pulitzer board, writing, “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.”

In the face of Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of the FBI, and the inescapable conclusion that the Post and the Times published false information throughout their respective bodies of work, will the board now reconsider its decision? Will the Post and the Times reconsider their decision to keep these awards?

No, and no.

The saddest thing of all, though, is that there are still people out there — millions of them, in fact — who think that the political reporting of the Post and the Times is believable.

Then again, there are also people out there who think the designated hitter is legit, the WNBA is watchable, and the Obama administration was scandal-free.