It’s indisputable at this point that the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media has a liberal bias.
Starting with ex-CBS News reporter Bernie Goldberg’s seminal work “Bias,” the contemporary legacy media’s liberal proclivities are thoroughly documented.
Fortunately, for conservative Americans, there’s been an explosion in alternative news and commentary outlets that offer a balance previously unattainable to the people.
It’s also fortunate for Republican politicians, like our governor, Glenn Youngkin, who recently endured a blatant lie from a reporter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Although it was promoted by The Washington Post and Democratic Party apparatchiks, center-right voices are pushing back, and hard, as The Washington Free Beacon reports:
On March 10, the Times-Dispatch promoted a blatant lie about Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R., Va.), one of the most reviled politicians among left-wing activists. Reporter (and “lifestyle photographer”) Mel Leonor wrote that Virginia school superintendents had criticized Youngkin’s education policies in “a blunt letter representing the views of all 133 state superintendents.” Leonor repeated the claim on Twitter, asserting that “133 Virginia school superintendents chided Youngkin’s education department” in the letter.
However, that simply wasn’t true.
On March 14, local ABC affiliate 7News became one of the only media outlets to report the truth—that the letter was written and approved by the 12-person board of the Virginia Association of School Superintendents, and no one else. The rest of the state’s 133 school superintendents “were not advised of the letter before it was sent to the Governor’s administration.”
The group’s executive director, Ben Kiser, was perhaps more than happy to imply otherwise, given that he opened the letter by claiming to speak “on behalf of 133 public school division superintendents.” It would be easy enough to blame Kiser for the confusion if journalists and their Democratic allies weren’t constantly lecturing the rest of us about the importance of rigorous reporting methods and the need to fact-check authority figures.
Besides the Times-Dispatch, The Washington Post quickly touted the group’s open letter as the gospel truth in a headline breathlessly declaring “All 133 Virginia School Superintendents Urge Youngkin to Scrap Tip Line, Effort to Root Out Policies Deemed ‘Divisive.'”
The Post, widely revered as a newspaper of record, unironically has used the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for years. Apparently, fact-checking has flatlined since the days of Woodward and Bernstein.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t alone in taking the Virginia Association of School Superintendents’ duplicitous letter at face value.
Axios, a website that describes its mission as making its readers “smarter,” reported that Youngkin’s education reforms “are facing a revolt,” and even suggested (without evidence, obviously) that the letter from the “group representing all of Virginia’s 133 school district superintendents” represented a “rare show of unity” in opposition to the governor’s agenda. As of Tuesday, the story had not been corrected.
Despite this, Youngkin, by all accounts, remains committed to abolishing virtually every equity initiative at the Virginia Department of Education.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of The Republican Standard.