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There’s nothing surprising about the fact that ABC’s resident Captain Hammer wannabe uses clothespins to nip the waist of his perfectly clean firefighter jacket like a department store mannequin — or that he would take the time to do so while reporting on devastating fires in Los Angeles. What’s surprising is that anyone would expect any different from David Muir.

If this is the first you’re hearing of clothespin-gate, just watch this:

People do all kinds of things on television to look better for the cameras, most of which is unobjectionable. (Please, never stop wearing makeup, Joy Behar.) Sure, Muir playing dress-up and pinning it to show off his hourglass figure is a little act of vanity that makes him and his network look a bit like a fraud. But that wasn’t the first or most obvious clue.

Like every other entity in politics, the media have their own agendas, and it just so happens that the vast majority of them align with the interests of the Democrat Party. For the vast majority of that vast majority, the “news” is just performative theater they deliver to advance their interests.

Hate Trump and want to make your viewers hate him too? Yell through the television about how he’s literally Hitler and a threat to democracy and call it “analysis.” (Just be ready to show up on “literal Hitler’s” doorstep to make amends after he wins the election anyway.)

Trump’s appearance on the political scene was clarifying because it made journalists so angry, they dropped the pretense of “objectivity.” Margaret Sullivan, whose pedigree includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism School, and the Pulitzer Prize Board, said as much in a “manifesto” she published in 2022, in which she argued that the media had not shown enough contempt toward Trump in the six years since he ran for office and needed to start making it more obvious.

If you need another example of how media outlets launder fake news to advance partisan goals, recall the Russia collusion hoax. After Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for the invention of salacious lies involving Trump and Russia, those lies were shopped to U.S. intelligence agencies. In line with the FBI’s common practice of leaking information to the press, the allegations made their way into the hands of The New York Times, whose reporters were happy to regurgitate them.

The debunked February 2017 story, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence,” and all the subsequent articles repeating its contents did exactly what they were designed to do: provide the appearance of independent confirmation of the leaked lies about Trump so the Democrats who invented the hoax in the first place could use the media reporting to keep attacking Trump. It was a feedback loop, and the willingness of all but a handful in the corporate press to participate was an industry-disqualifying failure.

The Russia hoax was one of the most elaborate “scandals” the media cooked up about Trump, but you could throw a dart at a calendar of any of his four years in office and probably hit a day on which the media made up lies about him. When Trump suggested that war hawk Liz Cheney should try fighting her own foreign wars sometime, the headlines screeched that Trump was threatening to execute Cheney by firing squad.

The media manufactured Kamala Harris’ entire campaign, writing about her Chuck Taylors and her joy and her brat vibes. They magically delivered polls that showed a big Harris bump when she entered the race — a bump Harris’ own internal pollsters never saw.

That same institution told you that anyone who challenged the reigning narrative about Covid-19 lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccines was spreading disinformation. They stood in front of burning buildings in middle America and told you the blazes were “mostly peaceful” because something something George Floyd. They told you Joe Biden was running the country.

David Muir’s own network, by the way, was just forced to pay $15 million because one of its hosts allegedly defamed Trump by falsely claiming he had been found liable for raping a woman.

When you read or hear something from any of the outlets that went along with those — and countless other — hoaxes, you should ask yourself why they might want you to absorb such “news” and probably assume the opposite is true until proven otherwise.

Chances are, what they’re selling is faker than David Muir’s Firefighter Barbie outfit.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.