A journalist would have grilled Adam Schiff on his secret attempts to censor his enemies, but ABC’s Jonathan Karl is not a journalist.
California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff, who helped spearhead the Russia collusion hoax and the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump, appeared on ABC News’ “This Week” with co-anchor Jonathan Karl on Sunday. When Karl questioned the California congressman on President Joe Biden’s gross incompetence in mishandling classified documents, Schiff predictably used the interview as an opportunity to smear efforts by his Republican colleagues investigating the matter and to take cheap shots at Trump.
“Congress shouldn’t try to interfere with the [DOJ’s] investigations [into Biden]. I think sadly that’s what [Kentucky GOP Rep. James] Comer’s object is,” said Schiff. “He showed no interest in investigating the far more serious situation with about 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago with evidence in the public domain of obstruction. Now he’s suddenly interested in investigating President Biden.”
“I think there’s so many stark contrasts [between Joe Biden and] Donald Trump on policy, on decency, on devotion to the truth,” he separately added.
The comments came the same day Biden was busted for falsely claiming during a Sunday appearance at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church that “he began his career as a mid-20th-century civil rights activist.”
Schiff Avoids Scrutiny
While Karl’s teeing Schiff up to regurgitate White House talking points should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with the legacy media’s propagandist tendencies, it’s what the ABC News host didn’t include in his line of questioning that’s even more revealing about the interference media figures run for Democrat politicos.
Over the past several weeks, journalist Matt Taibbi has released a series of “Twitter Files” documenting efforts by Schiff and his staff to pressure Twitter into censoring individuals and content they didn’t approve of — even if said accounts or posts didn’t violate the platform’s guidelines. In a batch of files published on Jan. 3, Taibbi unveiled a Nov. 12, 2020, email detailing how the California Democrat’s office asked the Big Tech company to suspend several accounts, including that of journalist Paul Sperry, which Schiff’s staff claimed “repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies.”
While Twitter refused to abide by the request at the time, Sperry’s account was ultimately suspended without reason back in August.
But Schiff and his team’s censorship efforts didn’t stop there. In a separate batch of files released on Friday, Taibbi reveals much more extensive censorship requests by Schiff’s staff. In April 2020, a staffer for the California Democrat asked Twitter to take down a post including a parody photo of Biden that was retweeted by Trump. Despite the company’s refusal to remove the post on the grounds that the content had clear “humorous intent,” Schiff’s team persisted, with staffer Jeff Lowenstein asserting there was a “slippery slope concern here.”
While Twitter also declined requests for “bans of content about Schiff and his staff,” the Big Tech company engaged in “deamplification” of “QAnon related activity” — a subject which Schiff’s staff routinely complained about. As noted by Taibbi, however, such posts flagged by Schiff’s office “were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine ‘whistleblower’ or the Steele dossier.”
Despite such egregious attempts by his staff to silence dissenting voices online, Schiff didn’t receive a single question from Karl about the subject.
Legacy Media: ‘Twitter Files? What Twitter Files?’
Unfortunately, Karl’s obfuscation of Schiff’s scandal is nothing new when it comes to the loathsome behavior of America’s legacy media. Since the continuing release of the “Twitter Files” began late last year, corporate cable news outlets have overwhelmingly refused to cover the topic.
According to a Fox News report published last month, major media networks “NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, and CNN largely ignored the ‘Twitter files’ on the air, with only MSNBC offering substantial coverage of the company’s internal documents.”
“CNN covered the story for three minutes, only on Dec. 9, while MSNBC spent two minutes on the story the same day, as well as five minutes on Dec. 11 and four minutes on Dec. 12,” the Dec. 13 report reads. “CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News have not discussed the Twitter files in the last week.”
It’s not that Karl and the corporate press aren’t aware of the “Twitter Files” and their damning revelations about collusion between Twitter and leftist government officials to censor and shadowban conservative figures: it’s that they openly support such practices.
Like many of their fellow Democrats, the “liberals” posing as independent journalists are perfectly fine with the state colluding with private enterprises to silence Americans dissenting from the regime’s status quo. And if that means sacrificing all aspects of journalistic integrity, then so be it.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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