Imagine wanting to watch this: a CNN host interviewing a former MSNBC honcho and CNN’s disgraced Jeff Zucker.

Blech! The combined self-importance of the 3 must have stunk up the room like a skunk stinks up a garden party.

CNN host Michael Smerconish spoke with former cable news executives Phil Griffin, who ran MSNBC from 2008 to 2021, and Jeff Zucker, who ran CNN from 2013 to 2022, for an in-depth conversation on the state of media today and its impact on political polarization.

The conversation took place at the Un-Convention, held last week in Philadelphia, billed as “an exploration of political reforms to improve our election systems and policy ideas to govern a divided country.”

pic.twitter.com/yNazCbZqM4

— Mark Judge (@markgjudge) October 14, 2022

A CNN reporter discussing with former MSNBC and CNN head honchos how to reform our political system to improve policy making in a hyper-partisan environment? Just the people we need to bring peace in the political valley, I would say! Who could we trust more to bring comity and moderation back into vogue?

The most remarkable part of the discussion was regarding the (non)coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop that appeared in the last few weeks of the election. The classic “October surprise” that had the potential to change the outcome, both news organizations chose to bury the story like a stinking corpse–only much more than six feet under. (For some reason stinking is a theme for this post). They also colluded with the FBI and the social media companies to bury the story as deep as humanly possible.

CNN’s reporter, Michael Smerconish, wondered aloud whether the media had undermined its stellar reputation for being completely unbiased by appearing to cover up for Joe Biden until well after the election–it was in fact months before the New York Times broke the embargo on the story by admitting that the laptop was real in the umpteenth paragraph of a story on Hunter’s legal jeopardy. Smerconish had, perhaps, a mild regret that they appeared to have been putting a thumb on the scale for Joe Biden. Not that this could possibly be true, you understand, but some might have seen it that way.

Unsurprisingly neither Zucker nor Griffen agreed. They had played the story just right. After all, it was late breaking and disputed (that never happens in politics!), and had the potential to swing votes away from Biden, and that should never be allowed:

At one point during the fascinating conversation, Smercornish grilled both Griffin and Zucker about their network’s limited coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop ahead of the 2020 election – a topic now used by the right to declare the media both un-trustworthy and in the pocket of the Democrats.

“I think that the Hunter laptop was worthy of more airing than it received right before the election,” Smerconish began, setting up his question.

“Either of you agrees with me on that? Do you regret? How about if I ask you this way, specifically, do you regret not dealing with it before the election?” he then asked Zucker.

“Well, I mean, I think I think we, the question is, we did deal with it. But to the degree that, you know, you would have thought was appropriate. I think the answer is in the final two weeks, you know, it was looked at. We did not know enough about it,” Zucker answered.

“There was not you know, there was not within two weeks of the election, the ability when the messenger on that story was Rudy Giuliani,” Zucker continued as the audience groaned, adding:

Okay. No, I mean but I mean, that’s the problem. It’s like you’re going to give a lot of legitimacy to Rudy Giuliani delivering, you know, he’s got the goods. So part of the issue with that story was who was delivering the goods? Okay. That’s one. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t look into it. We did. We did look into it. But first of all, you know, with regard to the son of the candidate, you know, he was the son of the candidate. He wasn’t the candidate. The question that you’ll come back with is, well, but what role did the candidate play in his business dealings? You know, frankly, with ten days or two weeks to go, it was looked at by very credible organizations, includingThe Wall Street Journal —Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — and they found nothing at that time. Okay. So my point is, it’s easy to say we should have spent more time on that. Listen, do I think it’s legitimate to look at. Sure. Do I think that like it’s a legitimate criticism to say that in the ten days, 14 days prior to the election, you didn’t spend enough time on it? Not really.

“What do you think?” Smerconish then asked, turning to Griffin.

Ah, yes, CNN strives to be fair to all, and since this story (which not only was quite true, but also had actual photographic evidence to back it up) came so close to election day (2 weeks!) that it would hurt his candidate. Plus, horrors of horrors!, it would give credibility to a Trump ally, which cannot be done even if he is saying true and important things.

So there!

“He was never arrested. The Justice Department was looking into it, never reported it until he is the son of a candidate. I don’t think it’s a main story until that happens,” Griffin replied, adding:

Now, we looked into it. You know, NBC News did, Tom Winter and Ken DiLanian did a great job. They met with Rudy. He brought a couple of pages printed out from the so-called, from the, from the computer. They asked for a digital copy of it. They didn’t get it. But I don’t think it was a big story before the election because he was never found. He was never charged.

Zucker then jumped back in and turned the tables on Smercornish, asking, “Did you cover it?”

“Did I tell you not to cover it?” Zucker followed up as Smercornish answered.

“I regret it. I regret it,” Smerconish conceded after Zucker pushed a bit more.

“I talked about it, but I talked about it extensively on radio. But no, Jeff’s right. I didn’t. And I second guess myself now, I don’t think it’s a huge story, but I don’t think it’s a huge story. But I think I look bad by not talking about it at all. I should have said something about the damn issue. That’s what I’m talking about,” Smerconish argued.

Not a big story unless and until Hunter Biden is arrested? Uh huh.

Especially in the context of the FBI spending years committing illegal and unethical acts to destroy the president in power, you must trust them regarding how they judge the opposing candidates’ son.

Not to mention that the FBI has regularly made clear that they back off politically charged investigations during the last few months of an election cycle (unless they can harm a Republican).

There is a reason I included Mark Judge’s response to the Mediaite tweet: Judge, as you may recall, was relentlessly smeared by the media during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings when he was up for Supreme Court. Judge was portrayed as a drunken likely rapist whose character was so evil that he deserved to be canceled from society. He, as a guy who was accused of being a bystander in the fake controversy being used to smear Kavanaugh, was temporarily driven from polite society and turned into a boogeyman by the same media folks who had photographic evidence that Hunter Biden was committing felonies left and right–not to mention likely handing his candidate father millions in Chinese and Ukrainian money under the table.

Needless to say, Judge was never arrested, yet somehow it was just fine to smear him in service of a political end. Yet Griffin clearly thought doing nasty profiles of Judge was well worth the airtime.

CNN, MSNBC, and the mainstream media haven’t covered themselves in glory for decades. There may have been a time when they weren’t corrupt–perhaps–but we are certainly long past that time if it ever existed.

They are corrupt, self-serving, self-important, and hyper-partisan. Their goal is to serve a narrative handed to them by the Democrat Party, and they do so almost exclusively. When a reporter has the temerity to cover a story in a less-than-flattering way, as Dasha Burns of NBC News did after an interview with Fetterman gave her pause, they are relentlessly attacked by their own colleagues from deviating from approved truth™. The MSM piled on her for revealing an important but inconvenient truth, and that is unforgivable.

What's amazing is not the amount of twitter accounts attacking Dasha Burns.

It's the complete lack of colleagues at NBC and other outlets defending her against this. We see no "proud to call her a brave coworker and friend" None. Nowhere. pic.twitter.com/npxgSoPx2y

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 13, 2022

There is no entity more responsible for the hyper partisan environment than the mainstream media. Yet their narcissism either prevents them from seeing this, or allows them to justify it in the service of what they believe is a higher purpose.

In either case, a pox on them.