Like most conservatives , I don’t trust the media. Liberal reporters lie, omit facts, and ignore people who contradict their narrative. We all know that.

What’s more disturbing is when journalistic malpractice happens on the Right. Conservatives are supposed to be better than the Left. Yet we’re sometimes no better than the Washington Post and the New York Times .

A good example of this is Ben Shapiro, a popular conservative voice. The Daily Wire founder recently speculated about a sensationalistic story involving former President Barack Obama and a man who alleges that in the 1980s, he did drugs and had sex with the future president.

Shapiro responded to this allegation, writing: “Serious question after watching Tucker Carlson ’s interview with Larry Sinclair: why are his allegations significantly less credible than those of, say, E. Jean Carroll or Christine Blasey Ford?” Shapiro then added: “I'm just wondering why it would be so shocking for a young Barack Obama to have engaged in cocaine use and homosexual behavior when he admits in his memoir that he ‘used a little blow’ and wrote to his girlfriend, ‘I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.’”

Shapiro is damaging the ability of conservatives to be taken seriously as journalists. He mentions Christine Blasey Ford. As I have written about in detail for the Washington Examiner, I was at the center of Ford’s 2018 allegations that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982 while in high school and that I was in the room when it happened. It was a lie that created a media frenzy. Simple jokes we had made in high school were taken to indicate that he and I were part of a drug and gang rape posse terrorizing Maryland.

At the time, Shapiro wrote this: “What’s certain is that not a single witness [Ford] has named corroborates her story, and she hasn't provided any details on location or date that would make it possible to verify her story. To suggest that more evidence is necessary in order to destroy Brett Kavanaugh's life isn't a slander against her — it's a call for some semblance of a rational due process, even in matters of public opinion.”

Shapiro still occasionally comments on the Kavanaugh hit. He has never asked me for a comment. Since The Devil’s Triangle , my book about the ordeal, came out last November, I have approached Shapiro, offering that instead of speculating about 2018, he could just, you know, talk to me. After all, one Amazon reviewer called my research “revelatory.” The five-year anniversary of that awful event is this month. The Daily Wire, like the Daily Signal, National Review, the Bulwark, the Dispatch, and others, may mark it without bothering to read or comment on my book, which correctly predicted the Left would launch an opposition research campaign against the Supreme Court.

Regardless, Shapiro’s theorizing is not any better than what the Left does. Shapiro concludes that it would not be “shocking” if Sinclair, a convicted fraudster, were telling the truth because Obama once mentioned doing cocaine and having an interest in men is doing to Obama what the liberal media did to me and Brett — although Obama’s case is more of a firecracker where ours was nuclear.

It’s not Shapiro’s first offense. He once panned a work of popular art without ever having seen it — the movie Black Panther. Shapiro admitted he had not seen the film, then went on a long video dissertation about everything that was wrong with it. I called him out on it . Shapiro’s video has since been taken off of YouTube.

Ignorance by omission, blasting movies you haven’t seen, speculating on historical events without talking to those who were involved and actually there — it sounds like liberal media malpractice. It makes me appreciate thorough reporters such as Byron York and Matt Taibbi.

It also makes me miss Robert Novak. Novak is a conservative media legend; his autobiography The Prince of Darkness should be read by anyone who wants to be a reporter — or a pundit. Novak was ideologically conservative, but he was also curious, accurate, and eager to talk to anyone. (Is there any question that had the Kavanaugh attack happened when he was alive, Novak would have read my book and taken my call?)

“Mr. Novak had nothing in common with the partisan water-carriers who pass themselves off as conservative ‘journalists,’” The Economist noted about the man nicknamed “the prince of darkness.”

In an obit that ran in the left-wing magazine The Nation, John Nichols observed that “the important thing to recall about Novak is that, at his best, he was an ideological rather than a partisan journalist … Novak would eventually declare himself to be a ‘right-wing ideologue.’ But his columns and comments were often as rough on the Republican establishment as they were on the Democrats.”

Conservatives could use journalists willing to deal blows to both sides of the aisle — if only to prevent the Right from becoming a less repulsive Left.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.