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Editor’s Note: Miranda Devine sketches the extreme mainstream media bias against President Trump, pointing out how they obscured Joe Biden’s racist gaffe on the campaign trail. Thankfully, Trump has an able press secretary to handle the press.

Originally published by The Daily Telegraph. Subscribe here for more excellent journalism.

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She may be unpopular among the press corps, but that’s precisely why the President’s new press secretary is also the biggest asset in the White House’s arsenal right now, writes Miranda Devine.

The White House’s pugnacious new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany is getting up the nose of Trump-haters in the media in the most satisfying way.

Her press briefings are “indefensible and grotesque”, snarled Never-Trumper Jonah Goldberg on the weekend, calling McEnany nothing more than a “Twitter troll” who just wants to impress “an audience of one” – aka the President. “It’s a sign of defining deviancy down in our politics”.

 

Fox News’ Chris Wallace agreed, saying he, “never saw a White House press secretary act like that”.

Well, maybe that’s because we never have seen such dishonest, corrosive media coverage of a president before.

It’s one thing to be critical and cynical about an administration – that is the proper role of a free press.

When you apply the blowtorch only to one side of politics, it’s bad enough. But with Trump, it’s beyond mere bias. This time the media is off the rails, unrepentant about its role in “Obamagate”, fomenting the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, peddling the fake Steele Dossier and other lies which crippled the administration and led to the dangerous distraction of impeachment.

Formerly respectable publications became willing participants, or maybe just manipulated dupes, in an attempted coup by the spy agencies and Obama administration officials against a democratically-elected President, who polls show is still supported by about 44 per cent of Americans.

Now that those abuses are coming to light through declassified material, an Inspector General’s Report, defence lawyers for railroaded General Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, and ongoing criminal investigations by the Department of Justice, there is an opportunity for those media outlets to atone, hand back their Pulitzers and report the truth.

Instead they’re doubling down, dismissing the unravelling of the Russia collusion conspiracy theory as, itself, a conspiracy theory.

As former CBS former president Van Gordon Sauter wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week, much of American journalism has become the “clarion voice of the Resistance, dedicated to ousting the president”.

“News organisations that claim to be neutral have long been creeping leftward, and their loathing of Mr. Trump has accelerated the pace. “To many journalists, objectivity, balance and fairness — once the gold standard of reporting — are not mandatory in a divided political era and in a country they believe to be severely flawed.”

Enter McEnany, who unlike her predecessors, is willing to give the media a taste of its own medicine.

What enrages the Washington press corps is that she is smart, well-prepared, articulate, unafraid, and always looks a million bucks. Unlike her predecessors, she cannot be intimidated.

The 32-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School previously was a CNN political analyst. A devout Christian, she is married to a Tampa Bay Rays baseball star team with whom she has a six-month-old baby girl. She spends most of her day with Trump and says her

“mission is to bring you the mindset of the president, deliver those facts, so this President gets fair and accurate reporting and the American people get fair and accurate information.”

For example, asked last week what the President meant when he said “Obamagate” was a crime, she was ready:

“I’m really glad you asked because there hasn’t been a lot of journalistic curiosity on this front.”

She went on to itemise wrongdoing, including spying, leaking and falsely obtained warrants.

“The Steele dossier, funded by the Democratic National Committee, an opposition political party to the President, was used to attain … warrants to listen in on conversations of people within the Trump campaign.

“ … We know that there was a lot of wrongdoing in the case of Michael Flynn. The FBI notes, for instance, that said, ‘Should we,’ quote, ‘get him to lie,’ as they pontificated their strategy. We know that the identity of this three-decade general was leaked to the press — a criminal leak to the press of his identity in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.

“ … These are very serious questions. They’ve been ignored by the media for far too long … Perhaps you should look into it and get me some answers. That is, after all, the job of reporters, to answer the very questions.”

Kapow!

Later, she pointed out that the three-year Mueller probe – the equivalent of a royal commission – into Russia collusion found none

“We can talk about a CNN historian who said there was a smell of treason in the Trump-Russia probe, when, in fact, for three years, you all talked about collusion and there was none. And it was a huge injustice not just to this administration, but to the American people who deserve truth — not the alleging of absolutely false allegations against this President.”

The backdrop of the saga of the Trump presidency is the hyper-partisanship of a media industry whose new business model is to feed the addictions of readers afflicted with Trump derangement.

It should have been a big political story, for instance, when the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden gave a disastrous interview on Friday to a radio show popular with black Millennials.

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black,” he said.

The comment was as lethal to his electoral prospects as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” insult to half of America in 2016.

If Trump had said something so blatantly racist it would have been on high rotation all weekend. But for the Resistance Media it was a story to be downplayed.

“Joe Biden made an off-the-cuff joke”, was the op-ed page take of the New York Times, which ran a tiny page one pointer to page 21 on Saturday about Biden’s so-called apology. After Biden’s campaign said the comment was “in jest”, which anyone watching knew was not true, Biden tried a different tack, saying maybe he shouldn’t have been “cavalier” and a “wise guy”.

But OMG, look over here!

Trump played golf!

Trump didn’t wear a mask!

Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine!

Orange Man Bad!

No, we’ve never seen anything like it.

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Photos: Mandel Ngan/AFP; Wikimedia Commons.