Las Vegas Review-Journal

Hearings about Team Biden die in darkness

- By Tim Graham Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center.

THE easiest layup in proving the “mainstream media” is hyperparti­san is to study how they cover congressio­nal hearings. After two years of obsessive media promotion and congratula­tion and live coverage of the Pelosi-picked panel on Jan. 6, the network “newscasts” can’t locate a hearing now with two hands.

On March 1, the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland for the first time in the new Congress. The hearing was not devoid of newsworthi­ness. The New York Times headline was “G.O.P. Senators Fire a Barrage of Intense Questions at Garland.” They placed it on page A-18.

That almost deserves a cupcake. There was nothing that night from ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS or NPR. What this hearing exposed is that Garland’s Justice Department is political and partisan, a law enforcemen­t bully for the Biden White House.

Sen. Ted Cruz hammered Garland for his department’s complete failure to do anything about leftist protesters outside of the homes of Supreme Court justices despite a federal law that bans “picketing or parading” near a judge’s residence. Biden spokeswoma­n Jen Psaki endorsed those protests. Garland prosecuted a pile of Trump die-hards for merely “parading” inside the Capitol, but not in this case. Garland claimed this was a local law enforcemen­t matter.

Cruz noted: “You spent 20 years as a judge and you’re perfectly content with justices being afraid for their children’s lives. And you did nothing to prosecute it.”

The networks don’t want any focus on Nicholas Roske’s sick assassinat­ion attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh — especially NPR, which has never, ever aired a story on it despite aggressive­ly pushing the leftist media fake-rape story during Kavanaugh’s confirmati­on hearing.

Sen. Josh Hawley grilled Garland about his department’s abusive treatment of Christian pro-life activists arrested outside abortion clinics compared with their complete inaction against pro-abortion radicals firebombin­g pro-life offices and crisis pregnancy centers and vandalizin­g churches.

Hawley cited the infuriatin­g case of Mark Houck, the Catholic father of seven acquitted in January of federal assault charges over an alleged shoving of an abortion-enabling “escort” outside a Philadelph­ia clinic. Houck was arrested at gunpoint in front of his terrified family in an FBI raid.

Once again, no one in this alphabet soup of red-hot abortion-pushing networks has touched the Houck outrage. You can see why they would want to skip this hearing.

Hawley also questioned Garland about a Jan. 23 memo issued by the FBI field office in Richmond, Virginia, advocating “the exploratio­n of new avenues for ‘tripwire and source developmen­ts against traditiona­list Catholics’ including those who favor the Latin Mass.” In this case, Garland tried to say he totally disagreed with this effort. Hawley instructed him that the FBI was following tips from the radical Southern Poverty Law Center.

Again, no one at the networks reported for one second on this FBI chatter about investigat­ing Latin Mass Catholics like they’re an insurrecti­onist threat. Now imagine Trump-era

FBI people talking about “tripwire and source developmen­ts” inside mosques, and envision the exploding network heads.

All of this aggressive ignorance exposes the lie that these outlets are the people who keep democracy from dying in darkness. Congressio­nal hearings are dying in darkness, at least in their “news” rooms.

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