Apparently this is going to be Unethical New York Times Op-ed Columnist Day. First David Brooks proves beyond all question that he’s an asshole, and now Michelle Goldberg pulls ahead in the neck-and-neck race to be the most outrageously left-biased writer in the Times stable (“And as they round the turn, it’s Paul Krugman in front, with Charles Blow coming up fast on the inside…”) by ending her column attacking retiring Fox News creator Rupert Murdoch with this:

“The electorate that Fox helped shape, and the politicians it indulges, have made this country ungovernable. An unbound Trump may well become president again, bringing liberal democracy in America to a grotesque end. If so, it will be in large part Murdoch’s fault….”

Only a committed and ethics-free leftist propaganda agent who is confident that her readers are Marxists or morons could squeeze out such offal. Oh, I’m sure Goldberg believes this, which is scary in itself: the disgusting thing is that a publication that imagines itself as the flagship of American journalism would deem such a “bias makes you stupid” outburst as worthy of publication.

Fox News is an excellent example of how very flawed human beings can do very good and important things. Roger Ailes and Murdoch were not admirable for their character, but they did democracy, journalism and the American public a great service by partially freeing the nation from the one-sided, biased and corrupt journalism that had come to dominate politics and public opinion, especially in news broadcasts. Not only was America being manipulated, misled and deceived for decades, it was largely unaware that it was being misled and deceived, like a fish unaware that it is living in water. Yes indeed, Fox News slanted its coverage rightward as much as CBS, NBC, PBS and the rest listed to the left; sure, it was (and is) vulgar and shrill, but never mind: Fox didn’t automatically shill for Democrats, and it covered stories prominently that the New York Times and the Washington Post buried deep in its pages while the alphabet networks didn’t cover them all.

If journalists had no integrity and would craft their reporting to bolster their socialist, progressive, personal agendas rather than provide fair and balanced reporting, then Fox would add a bit more fairness and balance by countering the 90+% of the news media pimping for Democrats and progressive policies with a bias in the opposite direction. Sure, a genuinely objective and non-partisan news source would be better, but a) we don’t have any and b) progressive hacks like Goldberg would attack them as being fascists anyway.

Look what she’s really saying in that quote. Making the country “ungovernable” means making it possible for sufficient numbers of voters to see the problems, failures and corruption of Democratic leaders and progressive policies so the left no longer is guaranteed majority control of the government as it was from the Great Depression into the 1980s. Goldberg and her fellow travelers don’t like opposition and dissent from liberal cant; as Joe Biden says

…it’s a threat to “democracy,” or the radical Left’s version of it, which is “Trust us, we know best and forget that old Constitution thingy.” If it hadn’t been for that evil old Murdoch and his Frankenstein Monster news network that wouldn’t grease the wheels of wonderful pols like Hillary Clinton, imagine what the United States would be like today! A worker’s paradise. A Supreme Court that supports trashing the Constitution, present racial discrimination to make up for past racial discrimination, a dead Second Amendment, happy “migrants” streaming across the border to welcome American arms, national health care…and Fox News ruined all of that by daring to present the American public with facts and opinions that Barack Obama didn’t approve of.

Goldberg, since she is unable to tell any story straight, blames the rise of Trump on Fox (in fact Barack Obama bears much of the blame), conveniently forgetting that it was CNN that gave him invaluable free air time in the run-up to the Republican debates, convinced that Trump was just a fun side-show and good for ratings. She writes,

Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump’s rise…. After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.

Wow, what a convoluted mess of tortured logic, false facts and knee-jerk narrative-spreading. Subsequent revelations and materials show that much of Obama’s background was hidden or miscommunicated to the public, and there was nothing “racist” about Trump’s skepticism about Obama’s birthplace: he made the same accusation against Ted Cruz, who, last I checked, isn’t black. The Democrats’ despicable tactic of accusing any critic of Obama as being motivated by racism bolstered support for Trump; if Goldberg wants to point fingers, she should look in the mirror.

All mainstream sources of information are suspect, and Goldberg is furious that the public, thanks to Fox News, Trump, and her pals’ indefensible destruction of journalism as a profession, is finally catching on. She mouths the mandatory “falsehoods” line about an election that her own paper helped “steal,” and cements my diagnosis of lying hack by calling a futile and stupid riot “an insurrection,” which is part of her party’s propaganda campaign to steal the next election.

As for the rest of her attack on Murdoch and Fox News, Goldberg relies on an upcoming book by disgraced anti-Trump author Michael Wolff. “If Wolff is to be believed” Goldberg writes at one point. Well, Wolff isn’t to be believed: he himself admitted that his last Trump-bashing book was fueled by gossip, hearsay, guesses, and in his words, “a version of events I believe to be true.” Great. Donald Trump, who is accused by Goldberg’s paper of lying daily, and Joe Biden, who does lie daily, both deal in versions of events they “believe to be true,” or say they do.

Goldberg’s quote is a marvelous admission by a mouthpiece for proto-totalitarians—you know, 21st Century Democrats—that Rupert Murdoch, Fox News and Donald Trump are reviled because they dared to block what progressives once thought was their inevitable victory by any means necessary. Prime among those means was controlling how and what the public learned about their government and the world.