After Dramatics Over Attacks On the Press, We Get Silence On Jack Smith Targeting the Media
It’s been a long fortnight of perpetual wailing in the media over mistreatment by the White House. Following the press bans by the administration, there has been a constant focus on the media mirror, which makes the current ignoring of Jack Smith revelations especially poignant.
Smith, the Biden-era prosecutor, has been sitting for Congressional hearings regarding his Arctic Frost investigation centered on President Donald Trump and his actions surrounding the 2020 election results. There is little surprise that revelations have been coming out about overreach by Smith and overly aggressive investigation efforts.
Just considering the scope of this investigation, involving numerous government agencies, spelled out trouble ahead. When you have the DOJ, FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the National Archives, and the Office of Inspector General all part of the investigation, seeing that things spiraled out of control is not a surprise; it was expected.
Smith has been catching heat on the right for the manner in which he was investigating the phone records of a mounting list of Republican members of Congress, and one recent revelation is that he was even looking into citizens by chasing down checks sent in for political donations.
But another revelation has surfaced, and the disinterest seen in the press is rather perplexing. What has come out is that Jack Smith appears to have not only been on a witch hunt; he was employing the political equivalent of drift netting. This tactic saw him collecting the communications of over a dozen media outlets and close to 50 journalists.
The Senate Judiciary Committee released the notice of which outlets were found to be swept up in Jack Smith’s sweeping surveillance: CNN, CBS News, 60 Minutes, NBC News, CNBC, Fox News, The Associated Press, National Public Radio, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, The Federalist, Washington Times, and others.
But, in looking over all involved, we see very little in the way of not just outrage from these sources, but even reporting. For an industry that has been in an uproar for weeks over being unduly abused, this silence is rather deafening.
If the blocking of White House access was enough to have the press plunging into paroxysms of outrage, how is it that the news that a government investigation was overstepping and probing media communications does not generate vocal contempt?!
It is more than indicative that this is a case of generating a reaction based on the sources of the activity. When it is the Trump administration, the outrage has to be loud and constant. But when an investigator who is working at the behest of Joe Biden probes too deeply, this is regarded as acceptable behavior.
We see this playing out in the selective reactions of the few outlets that have reported on this Jack Smith revelation.
CNN’s Evan Perez described the Jack Smith communication sweeps as normal business. He makes it out to be little more than Republicans whining over the intrusion. He made zero mention of the press outlets that had been targeted.
At MS NOW, Stephanie Ruhle also declared that Smith’s snooping into not just the Republicans but also the press was business as usual. She had on reporter Carole Leonnig, who made out any complaint about Smith’s tactics to be little more than partisan carping.
Ruhle followed with her summation: “But as you said, there was nothing unusual about this investigation. In fact, he was going overboard potentially to cross the T’s and dot his I’s, which frustrated many.”
To get a feel for this display of the outrage of convenience, try to flip the script and get a sense of the reactions. Say, for instance, it was discovered Todd Blanche was found to have subpoenaed the phone records of dozens of Democrats on The Hill, began yanking the personal details of Act Blue donors, and gathered up the communications of dozens of news outlets in the process.
I seriously doubt that would garner the same type of shrugs we are getting in the press landscape today. Targeting Democrats and the media would lead to boisterous claims of the destruction of democracy and the shredding of the Constitution. We know this because that was the script heard before President Trump was reelected.
Finding out that it was Biden attack dog Jack Smith crossing those lines of comportment leads to a completely different reaction. That is, no reaction from the press at all.
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