Are we in a culture war in America? If so, can the media bring themselves to report on it fairly?

What would you say is the state of the Union at this point?

Well, let’s take a look at it.

Racial and sexual indoctrination in public schools. Treating concerned parents like domestic terrorists. Boycotts of states for protecting elections and children. Huge political divisions on abortion, free speech, prayer, open borders, crime, COVID, the economy, and raging government spending and regulation.

And then there’s this: While Republicans get investigated or impeached for every little thing – such as saying the wrong thing on a phone call that strangely happens to be leaked from the Oval Office – there’s no curiosity whatsoever about Democrat shenanigans. Such as, oh, I don’t know:

• the Clinton campaign creating a Russia collusion hoax out of whole cloth with FBI help;
• Biden’s actual extortion of Ukraine while vice president to help an energy company his son was involved in;
• the Biden family’s financial entanglements with our nation’s top adversary, China (and Biden’s subsequent China-friendly policies);
• Hillary’s shadow-government server, complete with illegally stored classified docs;
• Biden’s questionable cognitive state and more. Is this an even bigger hoax than Russia collusion?

Can you imagine the blowtorches that would’ve come out if Trump or any other Republican had done a fraction of all that? Where is the accountability for both sides of America’s ideological divide? Why isn’t an attempted coup by agencies of the federal government not a bigger deal? Because the perpetrators were Democrats?

Yet, leaping over all these real scandals, one newspaper actually tried to make a political crime out of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s unexplained weight loss. Really? We’ve got all the above and more on our plate, and you want to look at what Pompeo has on his?

If we’re not in a culture war, in which most of the media have taken a side, I’d sure like to see what one looks like. And after 40 years in the “mainstream” media, I can tell you from firsthand experience they have, indeed, taken a side.

Meanwhile, cases of media malpractice pile up, disserving and dividing the public, and destroying lives. Just a sampling:

• When three white members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team were falsely accused of rape by a black exotic dancer, the media couldn’t resist piling on them for perceived privilege and pillage. Oops. The case fell apart, under a dishonest, self-promoting prosecutor, and an unreliable witness who later went on to kill a man.

Even the New York Times ombudsman admitted, “It was too delicious a story. It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That’s a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us.”

• Nicholas Sandmann was actually a polite young man in the face of what can only be described as harassment by a Native American elder chanting in his face and insults hurled at him and other high school classmates by the Black Hebrew Israelites in a videoed incident at the 2019 March for Life in Washington, D.C. Unable to resist the possible sight of a MAGA-hatted white youth being disrespectful to a Native American – he wasn’t – newspapers and networks pilloried Sandmann for smirking. Again, too delicious a story to resist, even if false.

He settled defamation lawsuits with NBC-Universal, CNN and the Washington Post.

• Kyle Rittenhouse: The media also convicted this young man of manslaughter for shooting two people in self-defense during race riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020. A jury acquitted him of all charges.
• George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin to escape a pummeling in 2012 in Sanford, Florida: As Kansas City author Jack Cashill has written, “From the start, major media worked overtime to convict shooter George Zimmerman in the court of public opinion.” The jury acquitted him, of course.
• Darren Wilson is the Ferguson police officer who shot a charging Michael Brown, and who is likely in the Witness Protection Program now after being convicted by the media, and the Obama administration, based on the complete fabrication that Brown had chanted, “Hands Up/Don’t Shoot.” A grand jury would not indict Wilson, and even the race-obsessed Obama DOJ cleared him. After all the riots and burning, of course.
• Rolling Stone magazine agreed to pay the University of Virginia fraternity of Phi Kappa Psi $1.65 million – and a federal jury had awarded a university administrator $3 million in damages – after it published, then retracted, a completely unsupported 2014 article alleging a gang rape there. False. But hey, it’s well-heeled frat boys, right? Rolling Stone bought it without much skepticism.

Then there’s the little matter of the defamation of half the country by the elite liberal media, following Hillary Clinton’s lead, for having supported Donald Trump for president. The bias was so bad that the New York Times had to admit it: After Trump’s election, Times ombudsman Liz Spayd wrote a piece chastising how her newspaper never saw Donald Trump coming because it had no clue about the half of America that’s red.

“As The Times begins a period of self-reflection,” Spayd wrote, “I hope its editors will think hard about the half of America the paper too seldom covers. … The next question is whether The Times is interested in crossing the red line to see what this America wants next.”

I think we’ve seen the answer to that! But while Spayd’s article did no good whatsoever, it was a rare morsel of crow for her to chew on for a moment.

The Times actually served itself a more heaping helping of crow last month, with a series of odd op-eds in which its opinion writers admitted significant mistakes in their work. Among them was liberal columnist Bret Stephens, who admitted he was wrong to have called Trump supporters “appalling.”

He called it “the worst line I ever wrote as a pundit.”

“What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. I was blind to this. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected.’

“It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists – clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to ‘guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.’

“No wonder they were angry.”

And no wonder we’re in a culture war – one which the media simply can’t bring themselves to report on fairly.