“How did you not see it?”

That was the question a high school student asked journalist Ryan Lizza several years ago in a class I was teaching at Georgetown University. Lizza had been a writer in the 1990s at The New Republic at the same time as Stephen Glass.

Recommended Stories

• Elias Rodriguez is a son of the Left’s revolutionary ecosystem
• The national reaction to George Floyd's death was unnecessary and destructive
• The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate organization

Glass had written several fraudulent and fictitious articles for the New Republic. Glass had been found out but only after dozens of made-up articles had made it into print. A 2004 film, Shattered Glass, had been made about the scandal.

So how did the editors not see the fraud Glass was perpetrating? My journalism class — again, made up of high schoolers — were amazed Glass got away with what he did, and for so long. When I asked Lizza to come and speak to my students, a teenage girl asked him a question: How did Lizza not see Glass’s fakery, and sooner?

The answer, as conservatives have been arguing for decades, is that the media is leftist, and journalists only surround themselves with like-minded people. This bubble makes it difficult to see very obvious things in front of one’s face.

There is a correlation between the Glass disaster and the recent blowback to Jake Tapper, the CNN host who just released a new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. The book details how former President Joe Biden’s mental decline was covered up by his staff.  

Critics are pointing out that Tapper himself was helping to cover up Biden’s condition, slamming conservatives who pointed out that Biden often didn’t seem to be all there. Like the high school student in my journalism class looking at Glass, they can’t believe that Tapper and his colleagues missed what was so obvious to truck drivers, accountants, and teenagers across America.

There is a crisis not just of bias in the media, but of basic competence. Too many journalists now come out of the elite schools. They lack street smarts. It’s been going on for decades, and is now a full-blown crisis.

It so easily could have been avoided. All the press had to do was hire a few common sense conservatives. 

I had spent most of my young journalistic career in the 1980s as a liberal, moving easily from the alternative press to writing for places like the Washington Post. When I became a conservative in the early 1990s, the opportunities quickly dried up.

The irony of this is that had a place like The New Republic hired me, I would have seen the nonsense of Glass instantly. One of the notorious pieces Glass fabricated was “Spring Breakdown,” a 1997 article about the conservative CPAC convention. Glass described a scene of drugs, booze, and sexual assault, none of which was true. I knew this at the time because I was at the 1997 CPAC. I still remember a phone conversation I had at the time with Tucker Carlson. Carlson had read the Glass piece and wanted to know if I had seen anything that The New Republic had described. I had not.

And yet, after all of that, Rolling Stone magazine still decided to publish Glass. “Canada’s Pot Revolution” ran in September 2003.

In 2001, a man named Jay Forman wrote an article called “Monkeyfishing” that was published in Slate. As Jack Shafer, the editor at Slate who edited and published the piece, would later write, “almost immediately, bloggers, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, and the New York Times gouged huge holes in the piece.” The piece claimed that people were fishing for monkeys in the Florida Keys.

I had written for Shafer for the Washington City Paper, a weekly he edited in the 1980s. Shafer had refused to hire me at Slate in the 1990s because my politics had changed. As with The New Republic, I could have saved Shafer’s reputation by simply stating the obvious before publication. There’s no such thing as monkeyfishing. Like most liberal journalists, Shafer failed upwards, becoming the media reporter for Politico.

Another guy who got his start at the City Paper was Jake Tapper. Tapper and I have occasionally communicated over the last few years, especially when I was briefly in the media spotlight, including CNN, in 2018. At the time, I was taking care of my mother, who had dementia for the last five years of her life. Had Tapper once asked me about it, I would have said explicitly that Biden had dementia, but he never did. The media are drug addicts, high on their own self-righteous supply. They refuse to ask for help.

JOE BIDEN WAS THE PERFECT ‘DEEP STATE’ PRESIDENT

I recently called out what I believe is an obvious case of Glassian fraud by a journalist named Jamie Hood. Hood’s book Trauma Plot recounts a series of sexual assaults that Hood allegedly suffered over the course of two years. I found the stories unbelievable. I contacted NPR, The Atlantic and other places who had interviewed Hood, flagging the questionable stories. 

No one responded.