BERNARD GOLDBERG: American Journalism 2020: R.I.P.

As a personal favor, I ask you to please not laugh out loud when I say: Let’s take journalists at their word when they tell us the only reason they’re not running the Hunter Biden story is that, because they’re unbiased, honest, trustworthy professionals, they don’t want to traffic in an unsubstantiated smear campaigns.”

Okay, you can laugh your heads off now.

Let’s be generous and say that at the outset they had reasonable concerns. How could they know if the emails were real? The story might be Russian disinformation. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and pal, is involved — that’s a reason to be skeptical. The story broke in the New York Post, a tabloid owned by the conservative tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Fox News, another Murdoch property, ran with the story. How could they even know the computer in question belonged to Hunter Biden? Isn’t the computer repairman almost blind? And what a coincidence, they say, that all of this comes out just days before the presidential election!

It’s not their reasoning, dishonest as it is, that’s so annoying. It’s the sanctimony of these journalists that’s galling. They’re not running the story because they don’t want to be participants in a smear campaign that might affect a presidential election – and they want us to really believe that?

Let’s make sure we understand that these are the same people who ran story after story about a fake dossier that was packed with lies about Donald Trump.

They’re the same people who ran countless stories informing us that Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

These are the same noble journalists who gave Adam Schiff more airtime than their own anchors get – all because he said he had solid proof that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians.

Where was their concern for authenticity and their aversion to smear campaigns back then? Do they think reasonable people don’t notice how hypocritical – and corrupt – they are?

So if the story about Hunter Biden and his father Joe were about Donald Trump and his son or daughter, are we supposed to think that these journalists would show the same restraint they’re now showing?

Do they think anyone who’s been paying attention would actually believe that?

And speaking of American Journalism: RIP: Glenn Kessler, Brian Stelter laud NBC News for adding an editor’s note to its piece on ‘four more years of George.’

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines who have gone all-in to drag an aging Biden across the finish line.