This generation of legacy news journalists has permanently damaged the credibility of the U.S. press. A recent Harvard-Harris poll that tracked the level of trust the public has in major institutions had the media ranked dead last. And a survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford found that among 46 countries studied, the United States ranks last in media trust.

Cratering trust in the news media isn’t just a media problem; it’s a democracy problem. You’d think our fearless “defenders of democracy” would be all over it.

But of course, they only pose as freedom fighters in order to protect entrenched power, as well as their own positions within an industry that affords a luxurious lifestyle and the occasional whiff of real influence. This leads them to disregard facts that contradict the establishment narrative regularly. A piece in Politico last week by Jonathan LeMire on the implications of the Justice Department’s looming decision to indict Hunter Biden perfectly reflects this dynamic:

“In conversations, Democrats and senior West Wing aides are downplaying the potential impact,” LeMire writes, “arguing Hunter Biden was a factor in the 2020 election and voters elected his father anyway.”

While this may appear a harmless nugget of political speculation to the uninitiated, this sentence, which appears at the top of the article, intentionally disregards essential information — particularly, that Hunter Biden’s impact on the 2020 election was mitigated by a disinformation psyop perpetrated by U.S. intelligence agencies in accord with Big Tech and legacy media journalists. Politico itself played a starring role in this disinformation campaign by publishing the now infamous and thoroughly discredited letter signed by 51 former senior intelligence officials that falsely described the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian misinformation operation” only weeks before the nation cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election.

In the months and years since, it has been verified by numerous news outlets (though, predictably, not by Politico) that Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic, that there was credence to the notion that the Biden family, including the president, had engaged in foreign corruption, and that the letter was concocted as part of a political operation. In recent days, an unearthed email revealed that former CIA chief Michael Morell informed the group of former senior intelligence officials that he had drafted the letter out of a desire to “give the VP a talking point to use ” in his second debate against former President Donald Trump. Another former CIA chief, John Brennan, replied to Morell that this was “a good initiative” and that he would add his name to the list of signatories. Morell then assured the group that he’d secure prepublication clearance from the CIA before publishing it, but never did.

The letter, published by Politico the following day, enabled Biden to brush aside accusations of corruption credibly and gave the legacy media cause to dismiss the bombshell story altogether. The story faced further suppression online, where Twitter suspended the account of the New York Post for reporting accurately that the laptop was authentic. And while there is data to suggest that the laptop story could have moved the needle for some voters — a Rasmussen poll found that 66% of voters believed the story was “important,” for instance — we will never know the truth. The CIA-Big Tech-legacy media disinformation campaign was terrifyingly effective.

If you didn’t know any of this (and LeMire is assuming you don’t because, like most legacy media reporters, he thinks you’re a drooling idiot), you might think his article is just another rundown of horse race politics. You might even feel a twinge of sympathy for President Joe Biden because of his son’s addiction problems. (Democrats are suddenly eager to discuss Hunter the degenerate because they don’t want anyone talking about Hunter the bag man.)

But if you are aware of this, it becomes immediately obvious that the entirety of the LeMire piece is the product of unreality — a sham, a fantasy. And this is why Americans, on the whole, distrust and even loathe the news media. We aren’t nearly as stupid as they want us to be.

Soviet Union dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn once summed up the surreality of totalitarian state communications tidily: “We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

Propagandists such as LeMire know full well that many know his spin is pure fantasy. And yet there it is. In plain English.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.