RUTHFULLY YOURS

On March 25, news broke that Tara Reade, who had worked in Joe Biden’s office in 1993, alleged that Biden had sexually assaulted her by slamming her against a wall and digitally penetrating her with his fingers. Immediately after the event, she told her brother and a close friend. Both are willing to corroborate her claim.

Within 24 hours, Hillary Clinton retweeted a message from her 2016 run for president: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

The New York Times was also on the case. Its reporters searched records to find possible witnesses to talk about sexual harassment and assault rumors dogging Biden during his 26 years in the Senate and his eight years in the White House. It also ran daily reports showing videos of Biden pawing at little girls’ chests and sniffing their hair, as well as photos of him grabbing and hugging women. Lastly, it breathed new life into the stories of his insisting on swimming nude in front of female Secret Service Agents. In addition to that reporting, television network and cable news outlets ran regular panel discussions focusing on believing all women and Biden’s history of sexual harassment and inappropriate comments.

Just kidding.

When Tara Reade went public, the Democrat establishment media tried to bury the story for two weeks. Then, on Easter, a day on which many people are too focused on faith and family to read the news, the New York Times finally reported on Reade’s accusations. Instead of “believing all women,” though, the Times reported that it had weighed Reade’s accusations and found them wanting.

The bias starts with the headline, which doesn’t report the accusation as breaking news. It says, instead, that the Times is “examining” the allegation. The subheadline doesn’t tell the reader that Biden “denied” the accusation, which is a given. Instead, it states affirmatively, through a Biden spokeswoman, that “the allegation is false.” Also, “former Senate office staff members do not recall such an incident.”

The Times opens by repeating in straightforward fashion Reade’s accusation. The remainder of the report, though, is given over to exonerating Biden.

And make no mistake – this is an exoneration (emphasis added):

No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.

The article is also a threat. In the paragraph immediately after that exoneration, the Times states that, on Thursday, Reade finally filed a police report against Biden. It ends that paragraph with an ominous warning: “Filing a false police report may be punishable by a fine and imprisonment.”

The article isn’t journalism. It is, instead, a brief for the defense in a legal case. The Times is cleaning up after a candidate who has a long history of peculiar and creepy behavior around women and little girls. Rather than “believing all women,” it’s an effort to show that Reade is a liar and a Putin pawn.

Indeed, the Times is so desperate to salvage Biden’s reputation against charges of sexual impropriety that it stealthily edited the article after publication to remove language that initially acknowledged creepy Joe’s sexually abusive propensities. The above-quoted paragraph, with the highlighted language exonerating Biden, was quite different when first published.

As originally written, that paragraph stated, “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” In other words, as first published, the Times admitted that Joe Biden had a long history of sexual misconduct. The Times even tweeted out that paragraph, only to delete the tweet when it made a stealth edit to the language.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the original version and the stealth-edited version:

With Biden as the last man standing in the Democrat presidential primary, the drive-by media will do nothing to harm his viability, even if that means riding roughshod over their past “principled” stands and reportorial habits. This is because the media’s only principle, which it will never admit, is to unseat Republicans, especially Trump, and get a Democrat in the White House, along with a Democrat-majority Congress.