COMMENTARY: Exposing the left-wing media’s sloppy hoaxes

The old legacy media has not just become irrelevant, it doesn’t inform us anymore. It disinforms.

Two fresh examples of the mainstream media’s permanent “get” Donald Trump bias came this week, courtesy of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

On Nov. 25 the Times ran a story with the headline “Shorter days, signs of fatigue: Trump faces realities of aging in office.” It’s latest cheap shot was an attempt to show Trump, 79, was being physically worn down by the job of being president.

The Times’ “proof” he was becoming Joe Biden 2.0 was he had considerably shortened his daily work schedule.

But the Times had their sloppy little hoax quickly exposed when the White House released Trump’s private Oval Office logs from Nov. 12 to Nov. 25. Unlike the public schedule the Times based its bogus story on, the White House logs showed Trump had been working up to 12 hours a day and 50-hour weeks (not counting weekends).

As for the Post, it recently produced a biased and lazy piece of journalism so bad it was debunked by the Times.

The liberal media, which hate Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as much as they hate Trump, jumped on the Post’s claim — from an anonymous source — that Hegseth had basically committed a war crime.

The charge was that he issued a verbal order to kill the two surviving crew members of a Sept. 2 U.S. airstrike on a speed boat suspected of carrying cocaine for Venezuelan drug smugglers.

After the high-speed boat was partially destroyed by fighter jets on their first strike, two surviving members of the crew who were clinging to parts of the boat were killed by a second air strike.

In what is commonly known in the military as a “double tap,” the follow-up strike was not specifically designed to kill the survivors. It was designed to sink the rest of the boat so its cargo of drugs couldn’t be salvaged and so it wouldn’t be a threat to other ships.

The Times thoroughly debunked the phony “kill them all” quote the Post attributed to Hegseth and the Post’s equally slimy attempt to mischaracterize the purpose of the second air strike.

This month, Adm. Frank Bradley told lawmakers in private that the second strike was his call, that it was militarily justified and lawful, and that Hegseth didn’t know until afterward there were two survivors clinging to the wreckage.

Attacking Venezuelan speed boats that are presumed to be carrying drugs with deadly force has become a hot legal issue in Washington. So far, at least 83 people have been killed by U.S. planes.

The White House has defended the airstrikes on smugglers as necessary to defeat the Venezuelan drug cartels in what it calls “an armed conflict” that threatens America.

Legal experts and human rights groups disagree. They call the airstrikes “illegal extrajudicial killings” and argue that it is not justified to use the military to kill drug smugglers without due process.

Democrats, of course, don’t care about legal niceties or dead smugglers. They see the airstrikes as their latest excuse to get Hegseth sacked or as another political weapon to use against Trump.

As for the dishonest and dying liberal media, they will show the horrible videos of speed boats being blown to smithereens over and over and travel 2,000 miles to interview the weeping wives of dead Venezuelan smugglers. But there’s one thing I know the liberal media will never do when they cover Trump’s deadly war on drug cartels.

They will never interview the loved ones of the 80,000 Americans who were killed last year by drugs and ask if they approve of what Trump and Hegseth are doing.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Contact at reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on X.