How does anyone avoid hiding their heads under a bag when they insist that our U.S. media is anything but an ethics-free partisan propaganda machine that validates Trump’s “enemy of the people” analysis every day, and often every hour of the day?

For weeks leading up to Monday’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District pitting Trump-backed Republican Matt Van Epps against Democrat State Rep. Aftyn Behn. to replace GOP Rep. Mark Green who resigned in July, the Axis media was sounding gleeful alarms that Republicans were facing another upset, that the House of Trump was doomed, that the metaphorical wheels were falling off because the President is a senile, blundering Nazi who is mean to all those virtuous and industrious illegal aliens, and everyone regrets not electing the babbling, cackling, incompetent the Democrats tried to inflict on the country after installing a demented puppet in the White House for four catastrophic years.

Sidney Wang had the perfect analysis of the legitimacy of that “narrative” decades before it began:

The media plot, and it was and is a plot, was a replay of what we have observed for a very long time now: journalists seeing their job as demoralizing Republicans and energizing Democrats with pipe dreams, lies, rigged polls, spin and calculated deception, all aimed at the majority of Americans who lack the political literacy and critical thinking skills to know shit from shinola, pardon my French.

Behn was and is a disaster on the high-heeled hoof, and anyone paying attention had to know she was toast, and indeed she was. Losing by 9% is not an upset, a triumph, or a rejection of anything but the candidate and her party. Never mind: CNN, the New York Times and the usual suspects all ran with the agreed-upon claim that this decisive defeat was really a victory, and a portent of a red collapse in the mid-terms. Funny, that. Van Epps didn’t win by the 2024 20 points for easily discerned reasons: 1) Green was an incumbent, while Van Epps was barely known before running; 2) Trump wasn’t on the ballot and 3) Republicans are historically and stupidly slug-like and apathetic during mid-terms. And Behn still lost by 9 percentage points!

The Axis media really and truly has no shame, no integrity and no depths to its contempt for the public’s intelligence or lack of it. Now Democrats, those strange creatures, have earned contempt. Behn famously said that she hates everything about Nashville, which is in the district she was running to represent. Guess which was the only segment of that district that Behn carried?

Yup.

The one lurking counterpoint I’d like to debunk in advance is the claim that the Axis hacks calling a 9% loss a near upset is only on par with conservative news sources calling Trump’s 1.5% popular vote win in 2024 a “landslide.” Yes, that was and is silly, as ex-EA columnist Curmie correctly pointed out (Curmie! What ever happened to him?). However, Trump’s Electoral College margin was decisive (not Reagan-Mondale decisive, but still); he did sweep the so-called “battleground states,” and he did, you know, win. That’s a proverbial far cry from calling a 9 point loss a moral victory.