Proving that that it has absolutely no shame about its misreporting, ABC News headlined its article on Sen. Rand Paul’s appearance on This Week “Sen. Rand Paul continues making false claims of 2020 election fraud.” This headline is fake in that Sen. Paul did not make any claim that the fraud was sufficient to change the results of the election, only that the fraud needed to be investigated. Nonetheless, ABC News continues with its baseless claim that there was no fraud in the election.
To support its fake headline, the article’s lead sentence included that factually false claim that Rand didn’t provide any evidence of election fraud.
Days after President Joe Biden took office and the Democrats took control of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., would not unequivocally say Sunday that the 2020 presidential election was not stolen and called for an investigation of fraud, without providing evidence.
As own transcript of Sen. Paul’s interview with host George Stephanopoulos clearly shows, Paul did provide an example of election fraud.
In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of absentee votes had only the name on them and no address. Historically those were thrown out, this time they weren’t. They made special accommodations because they said, oh, it’s a pandemic and people forgot what their address was.
So they changed the law after the fact. That is wrong, that’s unconstitutional. And I plan on spending the next two years going around state to state and fixing these problems and I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say, there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud.
Stephanopoulos tried to counter this by changing the goalposts, one of the Left’s favorite tactics, by claiming that there was no ‘widespread evidence’ of election fraud. Sen. Paul correctly pointed out that there has been no investigation of the allegations of fraud.
Both the original Stephanopoulos interview and ABC News’ report clearly part of effort to create a narrative rather than a journalistic exercise to discover the opinion of the show’s guest. ABC News’ framing the interview as Stephanopoulos presenting ‘facts’ against the ‘lies’ of Sen. Paul is a classic example of the journalistic malpractice that Paul pointed out in the interview itself.
The establishment media now becoming more flagrant in its corruption of journalistic standards. It is becoming clearer to the American public that the establishment media sees its role not as informing the public, but instead as forming public opinion. It is this perversion of the role of journalism, not any mean tweets from Trump, that has created so much distrust of the media.
