Jonathan Turley has been a must-read for years. A well-regarded lawyer with a distinguished pedigree, he currently holds the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at The George Washington University Law School and is all over print, electronic, and social media.

Turley has been a thorn in the side of both Republicans and Democrats because he calls the balls and strikes as he sees them. He was a nemesis of the Bush Administration due to his analysis of the legalities of Bush’s more creative war on terror policies, and in retrospect, he was right in his criticisms.

More recently he has been even more of a thorn in the side of Democrats, criticizing their massive abuses of power.

But Turley’s most recent battle has been with the mainstream media, which he views as totally corrupt and a tool of the Democrats’ war on truth and the law.

After I ran a column on whether we now have a de facto state media, former President Obama seemed to make the case for the value of an "undivided media" to avoid any "divided conversation. https://t.co/Z91QodM4Hz

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 16, 2023

If you have the time and inclination I would suggest you read everything he writes. His analyses are clear, concise, and devastating to the hypocrites who abound in politics. There is a reason he was the youngest person ever awarded a Chair at George Washington–he is brilliant in a way that so few are. Even very smart people make judgments based on emotion and work hard to confirm their own priors. I know I am subject to that flaw, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

You may have noticed that I get a bit passionate at times, and I admit that this can lead me to make errors.

Red wave last November? I bought that spin.

…Actually, we have seen that the far greater danger is an effective state media that shields the government and bars damaging stories. This is not the first time Obama has called for a unified media front to protect citizens from dangerous perspectives. https://t.co/WuhVjol5yi

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 16, 2023

Turley, though, avoids this sin more than most and hence provides a good gut check. I read Megan McArdle for the same reason. In neither case do I assume they are necessarily correct, but in both cases I trust that their judgments are made rationally and with a commitment to getting it right.

Turley’s analysis of the media is very blunt: he calls them state media, which is a kind way of saying propagandists for the regime. The regime in this case is the Elite, not necessarily whoever is in power.

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this is easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

Of course, Republicans have incriminating evidence on Joe Biden. His entire family, including grandchildren, is getting money funneled to them from the Chinese Communist Party. The media is claiming that millions of dollars sent to Biden’s children and grandchildren, including to his son who pays Biden’s bills and shares a bank account with him are a big fat nothingburger.

Until one sees a check written to Joseph Robinette Biden and signed by Xi Jinping, Biden is clean as the driven snow. It’s not even worth looking into.

WATCH: MSNBC Takes Less Than Half Hour to Declare 300-Page Durham Report a Nothingburger

Via @thaleigha_ https://t.co/MiMTJeCEsk pic.twitter.com/8kfNG8RD6x

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 16, 2023

Pravda would be embarrassed to print this stuff.

The whole purpose of influence peddling is to use family members as shields for corrupt officials. Instead of making a direct payment to a politician, which could be seen as a bribe, you can give millions to his or her spouse or children.

Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10 percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates warning not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like “the Big Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are referenced as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from Hunter.

Indeed, Hunter complains that his father is taking half of everything that he is raking in.

None of that matters. The New York Times ran a piece headlined, “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.” That is putting aside evidence against all the family members around Joe Biden. It also ignored that other evidence clearly shows Biden lied about his family not receiving Chinese funds or that he never had any knowledge of his son’s business dealings.

The evidence of corruption going back to the time that Biden was Vice President is out there in the open, but nobody wants to write the story. And nobody wants to write the story because the media elite is a subsidiary of the political elite, which in turn is a subsidiary of the transnational elite.

It is all one regime. In a very real sense, the media is in bed with the Biden crime family, because they are all part of a larger, informal club.

Trump was a foreign body, and he was never supposed to be part of the club. The MSM spent years hounding Trump over fake crimes, fake conspiracies, fake collusion, and fake scandals not because Trump was dirty–they don’t care if Trump or anybody is dirty–but because he was not a member of the club.

The coverage this week has all the markings of a state media. The consistent spin. The almost universal lack of details. The absurd distinctions.

It is the blindside of our First Amendment, which addresses the classic use of state authority to coerce and control media. It does not address a circumstance in which most of the media will maintain an official line by consent rather than coercion.

The media simply fails to see the story. Of course, it can always look to the president for enlightenment. Just before his son received a massive transfer of money from one of the most corrupt figures in Romania, Biden explained to that country why corruption must remain everyone’s focus. “Corruption is a cancer, a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy,” he said. “Corruption is just another form of tyranny.”

It is just a shame that no one wants to cover it.

On this point, I depart from Turley, who is still not cynical enough. The media sees the corruption just fine. It is simply inconvenient. They have a very good idea of what is and has been going on. How could they not? All it takes is paying a modicum of attention, and they are paid to pay quite a bit of attention to what is going on. That is supposedly their job.

No. They know.

They just don’t want YOU to know.