When Donald Trump infamously declared that the establishment media were “the enemy of the American public,” it seemed an extreme and inflammatory statement. But when you see just how depraved some pockets of our media have become, it’s not so hard to see why so many people would share this sentiment.

Just consider the “woke” media’s latest efforts to “cancel” a literal child in a fraudulent racism hoax.

The sad saga started during CBS’s Sunday NFL coverage, when the cameras panned to show one young Kansas City Chiefs fan, who looks somewhere around 10 years old, at the team's game away against Las Vegas. The young boy was wearing an American Indian headdress and had his face painted.

You probably know where this is going.

Some random weirdos on X got angry about this supposed “racist costume.” But the outrage really started after a sports writer for Deadspin wrote an article demanding that the NFL “speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress.”

“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once,” Carron Phillips wrote. “But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.”

Other small sports media outlets parroted a similar narrative accusing this fan of both wearing “blackface,” an offensive way of wearing black face paint that was historically used to denigrate black people, and anti-Native American racism.

There was just one problem: The entire narrative was based on a falsehood.

The young boy was objectively not wearing blackface. While the image shared by Phillips and other outrage-mongers only showed one side of his face, which was painted black, the full image shows his face was painted half black and half red. Can you guess what the Chiefs’ team colors are?

Oh, and the black players on the Chiefs didn’t exactly seem offended by this child:

Even if such a young child was seen in public “wearing blackface,” the ethics of massive media platforms attacking and trying to cancel someone not even into their teenage years would be seriously questionable. But to accuse a child of public racism based on, at best, a mistaken misinterpretation and, at worst, an outright lie is beyond disgusting. And, seeing as this child is in no way a public figure, it’s potentially legally defamatory.

Yet what about the child’s costume is supposedly being offensive to Native Americans? It’s actually a matter of debate within Native communities whether mascots, costumes, and other odes to Native Americans are offensive or not. And regardless, it’s not the media’s job to punish and publicly shame literal children for accidentally doing something some people find offensive. But the funniest twist is that the child is actually himself Native American, according to both his mother and family records that have been confirmed, so it’s definitely not “offensive” for him to wear one!

But Deadspin still hasn’t corrected its story. An editor, who is a white woman, has explained that given that the author of the article smearing this young child is a black person, it’s “not her place” to decide whether the costume is racist or not. (Because, apparently, skin pigment determines one’s ability to sort factual statements from falsehoods now!)

And the author of the story maintained his take in a since-deleted follow-up post, bizarrely claiming that the fact that the boy wasn’t wearing blackface but was wearing the team colors actually “makes it even worse.”

This is one of the most pathetic and disgusting establishment media fails in some time — and that’s saying something. Journalism is supposed to hold the powerful to account, not shame random children in the name of political correctness. And journalists are supposed to be tethered to the facts or, at minimum, correct mistakes when they do occur.

There are always going to be terrible people in any profession. But as long as establishment media outlets allow these kinds of errors and smear campaigns to occur without any serious professional consequences, the last shreds of their credibility with the public will continue to disintegrate.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is a YouTuber , an independent journalist, co-founder of BASEDPolitics , and a Washington Examiner contributor.