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The Associated Press reports that journalists are worried about President Trump’s second term:

The return to power of Donald Trump, who has called journalists enemies…

What have journalists called Trump? The AP, for one, has made itself an arm of the Democratic Party.

…and talked about retribution against those he feels have wronged him…

Later in the very same story, the AP quotes Trump: “I am not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly….”

…has news executives nervous. Perceived threats are numerous: lawsuits of every sort…

Journalists are nervous about lawsuits because ABC and George Stephanopoulos have just agreed to pay $16 million for defaming Trump. The solution to lawsuits is pretty simple: stop lying about Trump, and others.

…efforts to unmask anonymous sources, physical danger and intimidation…

Journalists tell us the right is violent, but in fact violence comes from the left. No journalists have been attacked, but Donald Trump has been shot, Steve Scalise has been shot almost fatally, an assassin tried to murder Justice Kavanaugh, a health insurance CEO has just been murdered in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan. Maybe journalists should ask themselves whether their biased and frequently dead wrong news reporting has contributed to the epidemic of violence on the part of leftists.

…attacks on public media and libel protections…

Many observers, including many legal scholars, believe that First Amendment law has gone too far in protecting false reporting by outlets like the Associated Press. Whether the law will change remains to be seen, but again, the best defense against libel suits is to stop libeling people–bearing in mind that it is only defamatory if it is untrue.

…day-to-day demonization.

The press has been demonizing Donald Trump on a daily basis since 2015. That is why they are nervous now: they are afraid some chickens will come home to roost.

There is much more that could be said about the AP’s story and about journalists’ anxieties, but here are just a couple more:

News organizations are heading into the second Trump era weak both financially and in public esteem.

Yes. Why is that? It is because they have repeatedly lied in order to serve the Democratic Party. The most notorious instance, although far from the only one–the press has been lying about Republicans for decades–was the Russia collusion hoax. In my opinion, it is disgraceful that any of the “news” organizations that collaborated with the Hillary Clinton campaign to spread the hoax–CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and so on–are still in business.

Finally, the AP takes a sympathetic view of ProPublica’s attempt to smear Pete Hegseth:

Pete Hegseth also used social media to say that ProPublica — he called it a “Left Wing hack group” — …

ProPublica is a left-wing hack group, although the AP describes its editor in chief as the “prominent editor” of a “nonprofit news outlet,” and quotes him positively in another context.

…was about to knowingly publish a false report that he hadn’t been accepted into West Point decades ago. The news site had contacted him after officials at the military academy contradicted Hegseth’s claim of acceptance. Hegseth provided proof that those officials were mistaken, and ProPublica never published a story.

The AP sees no problem with ProPublica’s collaborating with someone at the USMA who was trying to smear Hegseth to help block his nomination as Secretary of Defense. It was only because Hegseth happened to keep his acceptance letter from West Point, and, I take it, was able to produce the letter within the one hour allotted by ProPublica, that the lie did not go forward.

“That’s journalism,” noted ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger. But a narrative had taken hold: “ProPublica’s botched Pete Hegseth smear,” the New York Post called it in a headline.

That’s journalism? Well, yes, that’s journalism in the eyes of the Associated Press and the rest of the liberal media. I have seen no reason to believe that any significant number of journalists have looked in the mirror and honestly tried to assess why most Americans now view them with contempt. Let me spell it out: the liberal press is dishonest. It is a tool of the Democratic Party and the left. It lies and misleads, constantly, about Republicans and conservatives, while consistently covering up stories that reflect badly on Democrats and liberals.

Until journalists start correcting their misbehavior, they are going to continue to feel nervous. Because, as the AP says, quoting the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, “our most important audiences are the courts and the public.”