The Fix is In?

This week, the Washington Post chose not to endorse Kamala Harris for President, or any candidate for that matter. The LA times, the New York Times, the USA today, and 200 other Gannett-owned newspapers followed suit in refusing to make any Presidential endorsement. These are all liberal and left-wing newspapers, who have endorsed the Democrat for President for the last 36 years, so why are they refusing to endorse this Democrats candidate this year?

In an Op-Ed piece, the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos explained that Presidential endorsements “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.” He claims that his newspaper’s lack of endorsement is about salvaging the trustworthiness of a newspaper and an industry that is suffering from a severe lack of credibility. He claims that many potential readers have turned to the internet and podcasts for their news and information because they believe that the mainstream media has become too bias and too slanted to the left. That may be true, but is journalistic integrity and credibility really the motivation behind the Washington Post’s lack of endorsement of Harris? Over 90% of the Washington Post’s coverage of Harris has been positive and over 90% of its coverage of Donald Trump has been negative, so they have no claim to objective journalism in this election cycle.

Some have argued that all these newspapers believe that Kamala Harris will lose the election, so they are trying to save face by not endorsing the losing candidate. But all these same newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore, and their readership was not hurt by those endorsements because most of their readers voted for those same candidates and will vote for Harris as well. The lack of endorsement is baffling because even though Trump is leading in the polls, his lead is within the margin of error in many of the battleground states that will determine who is the new President. The election still can go either way, so an endorsement or lack of endorsement could easily tip the scales in one of these states which could tip the scales for the entire election, so why are they withholding their endorsement for the candidate that they clearly prefer?

Maybe there is a third explanation. Maybe, just maybe, these newspapers know that the fix is in. They know that, regardless of what the polls are saying right now, the election has already been decided, and a Kamala Harris’ victory is already signed, sealed and delivered. Maybe they have known this all along. Maybe that’s why the Democrats were willing to put forth a DEI candidate, who has nothing other to offer the country other than the fact that she is a woman with darker skin. She is an unintelligent, unserious candidate who the Democrats made their nominee without having won a primary. The party which is as cutthroat to winning elections as any party that has ever existed in our country, chose Kamala Harris to be their nominee against a candidate who they continually say is an existential threat to our country. So, they were willing to put her out there – her word salads, her constant cackling, her inability to answer basic questions – in one of the most important elections in our nation’s history. She’s the one that they hand-picked as their nominee. They know how bad she is, how unappealing she is, how unlikable she is, and they still made her the nominee. She is not anything like Bernie Sanders, who ran for the nomination in 2016 and 2020, and energized millions and millions of Democrats to vote for him. Harris has still not received one official vote for President yet. And she got the nomination anyway.

Maybe what we witnessed in 2020 has been put on steroids in 2024 by the Democrats. Joe Biden supposedly received 81 million votes in 2020. A person with obvious signs of early onset dementia who refused to campaign, supposedly received 11 million more votes than the young, attractive, charismatic Barack Obama received in his best showing. So, maybe we should not be surprised next Wednesday morning when Kamala Harris as unlikable, unappealing and unintelligent as she is, and as a poor campaigner as we have ever seen, receives 90 million plus votes. And all these left-wing newspapers and media outlets who refused to endorse Harris will be screaming at anybody who happens to question the results of this election. And they will do so from a standpoint of unbiased objectivity due to their lack of endorsement.

Modern mainstream media sources do not act independently. They act in unison. That’s the way modern America works. We have witnessed time and again how all of these liberal media sources mindlessly repeat back verbatim the same liberal talking points that are disseminated. So, whoever is calling the shots – cough, cough, Barack Obama – sends out the talking points to the liberal media, and the brain dead talking heads parrot Obama’s talking points. And the new talking point is a non-endorsement for Kamala Harris, so they can appear to be neutral, objective media outlets that didn’t have a skin in the game in the Presidential election, even though they were giving Harris overwhelming positive coverage, and Trump overwhelming negative coverage. They want to be able to claim that they are not partisan, so they can call everyone who objects to the election results partisans.

Maybe that is why the Harris campaign has doubled down on the vicious attacks on Trump in this final week of the campaign, calling him, “Hitler” and a “fascist”, characterizing his rally at Madison Square Garden as a “Nazi, white supremacist” rally, and calling his voters “garbage”, so when Harris wins with 90 million votes, the left-wing media will claim those votes were not necessarily votes for the unintelligent DEI candidate, but they were 90 million anti-Hitler, anti-Nazi votes.

Not only has the mainstream media has lost its credibility in the eyes of the public, our election system has as well. When I cast my ballot last week, I stuck it into some machine, and the ballot disappeared, and I have no way of checking to see if the voting machines are legitimately counting my votes as they are cast; I have no way of determining if the people who are running the elections at the polling place are actually honest or are they partisan hacks. There is nothing in place to assure the voter that everything is on the up and up. Absolutely nothing. So, we must trust the same government who has driven our country $35 trillion into debt, that takes anywhere between a third to a half of our income every year, that forced hundreds of millions of its citizens to take an experimental vaccine that has never been proven to be safe or effective, so they could further enrich their donors. We must trust them; we must trust those guys; take their word for it that the elections are fair.

There is too much power, too much money and too much corruption within our political system for us to pretend that the America we live in anyway resembles the America that our founders visioned. The politicians who run our country are selfish, corrupt, power-hungry people who don’t really care about the average American citizen or even the country as a whole. People come up with ideas about changing the system of elections all the time. Do away with the electoral college, use the popular vote or divvy up the electoral votes by how the individual political districts vote. It doesn’t matter when you’re dealing with this much power and this much money and this much corruption. Whatever rules you set in place; the corrupt power-driven politicians will devise ways to circumvent the rules to their advantage.

The non-endorsement of Kamala Harris by all these left-wing newspapers could be motivated by many things, but the one thing I know it is not motivated by is an attempt to return to objective, unbiased, credible journalism driven by the pursuit of the truth. Democrats and liberals do not believe in the truth. They are driven by power, and an objective, unbiased fact-driven approach to journalism cedes their power to the truth. The individual journalist becomes overshadowed by the truth. The partisan hacks in the media and in politics become impotent in the face of the truth.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.