It seems that the Inquirer is incapable of writing an article in which Donald Trump is mentioned without pointing out that he is a liar.
Interesting that the Inquirer, which purports to report the facts, has begun relying on mind reading. Trump does indeed protest that voter fraud cost him the election. Is he lying or does he really believe that the election was stolen? I don’t know and neither does the Inquirer. Would it be better journalism if the story would say something like “Mr. Trump continues to claim voter fraud even though there is no proof of such”?
Day after day, week after week, year after year the pages of the Inquirer were full of stories putting forth the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory. These articles were written even though there existed absolutely no proof of such a conspiracy. Was the Inquirer lying? Was the newsroom full of liars?
READ MORE — Wally Nunn: Mainstream media only sugarcoats the lie
Perhaps, like Mr. Trump, they wanted to believe it was true. Or perhaps truth did not matter nearly as much as destruction of Trump’s candidacy, followed by the destruction of his presidency.
Let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the Inquirer and presume they actually believed the Russian collusion hoax. Now that there is overwhelming evidence that there was no Trump/Russia conspiracy, only a hoax exposed as a plot by Hillary Clinton with a supporting cast that even included members of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, what does the Inquirer think?
I ask what they think, because they have been strangely quiet about the evidence that Trump was never involved in a conspiracy, but that Clinton was. There is more than one way to lie, and apparently the Inquirer has chosen to lie by omission. If a media source finds out that information they have disseminated was false, it behooves them to inform their readers of the truth. If a choice is made to ignore the new information, that is a lie of omission.
Of course, if the collusion story was the only example of the Inquirer’s lack of candor, it would be one thing. We all make mistakes. Like many media outlets as well as social media they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation (damn Russians are everywhere). The laptop story could very well have tipped the election to Trump. The fact that the nation’s media, with one notable exception, convinced the public that the laptop was not Hunter Biden’s may very well have elected Biden — there are reputable polls which say as much. I may have missed it but very little if anything has found its way onto the pages of the Inquirer about the fact that the laptop has been proven to be Hunter’s and that it has very damning information on it. Having played a (perhaps) unwitting part in tilting the election for president, don’t they owe it to their readers to correct untruths they published? Is this another lie of omission?
There is more than one way to lie, and apparently the Inquirer has chosen to lie by omission.
I believe that the Inquirer has, in the past, played an important role in bringing issues to the public’s attention. Just as importantly, they gave the public the information — the facts — needed to make informed decisions about those issues. To have a functioning democracy the public needs information but information which is based on facts. Information, which is calculated to support a narrative, the facts be damned, should be left to candidates or the editorial pages. Unfortunately, the news section of the Inquirer is now largely filled with articles written by “woke” sycophants who believe lies even by commission constitute legitimate journalism.
Wally Nunn is the former Chairman of Delaware County Council, a former member of the Delaware County Jail Oversight, and is currently the chairman of the Broad + Liberty board of directors.
“Would it be better journalism if the story would say something like “Mr. Trump continues to claim voter fraud even though there is no proof of such”
mr. wally nunn, there are ample proof and video evidence of the stolen elections, it is just an injustice that you perpetuate such a blatant disclaimer. that the courts refused to even watch and consider the evidence, does not means it was thrown out of courts by judges that refused to even look at it.
If anything, this column understates the lying by the Inquirer. They have printed numerous articles calling the events of January 6 as “deadly”. Yet only one person was killed that day, an unarmed women shot by a Capitol policeman.
If I wanted to point out all their lies I would need a couple of terabytes
I totally agree. That was the point of my comment.
It’s bad newspaper staffed with bad people and bad owners.
On the money, Wally!
Unfortunately, the Inquirer is just one example of the biased, narrative driven, reporting that pretends to be professional journalism in this day and age. Most large city “papers of record” follow the same script, as does most of the national television media. The consequences are such that a large portion of the population (about 50%?) distrusts the “news reporting” of most of the major news outlets. Perhaps more people would pay attention to, and be concerned about, the Jan 6 hearing that was televised by the major networks, commercial free, in prime time, if the J6 committee, as well as the major networks, did not spend years falsely claiming that the 2016 presidential election was “fixed” due to “Russian Collusion”. A J6 investigative committee that has Adam Schiff as a member has no credibility and cannot be trusted to perform an honest assessment of facts and motives.
Running as a conservative Republican for national and/or state public office is akin to participating in a sporting competition where the referees are actively supporting your opponent. I very often read/hear journalists use phrases like “….is a threat to our democracy” and “…..puts our democracy in peril” (“democracy dies in darkness anyone?). I believe that the single biggest current threat to our democracy is biased, left leaning agenda driven news organizations posing as objective journalism.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has not been credible news source for a long time. The last time it endorsed a Republican Candidate for President was when Walter Annenberg owned the paper. I subscribed to the Inquirer for more than 40 years. The ten years on faith that somehow the paper might get better and because several family members worked at the Schuylkill Printing Plant. I dropped my subscription four months after President Biden took office because the paper got so one sided that even a dye in wool newspaper fanatic could not pay a paper that lacked any objectivity whatsoever. The closure and sale of the Schuylkill Printing Plant made the decision that even easier. I still read the Inquirer for free at the Richmond Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia occasionally. The fact that I am no longer paying to read it makes it much to deal with the fact that it is a propaganda sheet for super progressive wing of the Democratic Party The Philadelphia Inquirer motto should be: ” We Print All of the News That Fits Our Narrative”
Wally,
Keep up the honest reporting.
DJ