How to explain the error-prone American media; is it a cover-up, is it lies, or simple stupidity? Top US newsman Jake Tapper has just added another leg to his Original Sin apology book tour, in which he retails how he missed Joe Biden’s dementia decline for years. Now, stop the presses, he admits Hunter Biden did in fact take millions corruptly from China and Ukraine, a charge levelled by Trump, denied by Joe Biden and never pursued by the legacy media. Remember how the media eighty-sixed (to grab a phrase in vogue usage) the Hunter Biden laptop during the dying days of the 2020 election campaign? Now, however, Tapper admits on CNN, ‘Trump was right, (Hunter) did make a fortune from China.’ Tapper can do a follow-up – More Sin! How I also missed China’s Biden payoffs!

On top of the recently released Robert Hur tapes, which show a US President as a nursing home candidate struggling to remember the year his son Beau died, an indefensible pattern of media bias and incompetence emerges. Yet Tapper is still out there, pushing his schtick on the airwaves, as if he and major media outlets and some of the biggest names in the business hadn’t been proven wrong on scores of hot issues over the Trump years. At what point do people stop listening? At what point do the Jake Tappers of the world say, ‘Hey, maybe I’m no good at this job, and I should just go fishing’? Gallup reports media trust in 2024 is at record lows: ‘For the third consecutive year, more US adults have no trust at all in the media (36 per cent) than trust it a great deal or fair amount.’

But everyone continues to pretend the legacy media is not tarnished, continues to rely on their stories and shamelessly expects you to happily tune in again tomorrow for the next round of half-truths and lies. Fake news is too kind a term. Add the Biden decline and Hunter’s corruption to a list that includes the Russia collusion hoax, the ‘fine people on both sides’ hoax, the Covid-era ‘drinking bleach’ hoax, the fake Steele dossier funded by Hillary Clinton and too many more.

No one expects the media not to make any mistakes, reporting being the first draft of history and so on. But for all of the media, the entire pack, to make the exact same mistakes as each other over the same time period is something different; it’s pack thinking, peer group pressure combined with an oft-stated desire to take down the big bad Orange Man. If it’s negative for Trump, it’s big news, hence the Qatar jet offer publicity, a bad look in anyone’s language. If something redounds to Trump’s credit, let’s scoff, or ignore it, anything but take it seriously. Accentuate the negative, downplay the positive. If you get it wrong you can always shove the correction on page ten in eight-point font, years down the track, and move on to the next crisis.

And it continues. Trump’s Gulf States tour was an extraordinary success of commercial diplomacy but you would only have known that by reading social media, the legacy media here and in the US choosing to underplay it. The spectacular Bedouin hair dance, where lines of women rhythmically shook their long glistening hair in greeting to Trump, was a gift to front pages all over the planet, but I didn’t see it used anywhere. If only half of Trump’s touted two trillion dollars of investments come off, it’s still a massive win.

This relentless media slant against The Donald also explains why the Coalition were so terrified of being tagged with the Trump label during the recent campaign. Our news media takes feeds from US legacy media, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, so our foreign news is full of negative or critical views of Trump. Most Australians are astonished when you say you support Trump, as if it is a confession of wickedness. They are usually unaware there is even another side to the story.

It also explains why there is so little reporting on that extraordinary treasure trove of fraud and waste, the US bureaucracy. Some $500 billion is reportedly lost to fraud every year, but Doge said the US Treasury also disbursed a further $US5 trillion a year without a code explaining what it was for. Cash out, but untraceable.

In a fascinating Doge round table recently, businessman Steve Davis said over 15 million people aged over 120 were on the Social Security rolls – when the oldest American is in fact 114. Over $300 million of small business loans had been given out to people under the age of 11, with the youngest recipient a nine-month-old baby. Davis said around 2.4 million federal employees had 4.6 million government credit cards. Healthcare tycoon Brad Smith said there were 700 different IT systems at the National Institutes of Health – ‘they can’t talk to each other’. A later Musk interview revealed a chart where Social Security numbers issued to non-citizens surged from 270,000 in 2021 to 2.1 million in 2024.

The US’s antiquated and inadequate infrastructure also threatens air safety, with Transport Secretary Sean Duffy warning some systems were so old that replacement parts had to be sourced from eBay, as they couldn’t be bought new. Amid endemic communications breakdowns and staff shortages, he has ordered air traffic at Newark to be slowed, for safety.

More widely reported has been the fraud and abuse unveiled at USAID, a now defunct agency, operating under the fig leaf of feeding starving children in Africa but in reality shuffling a lot of the funds back to DC. The African Development Foundation, for example, had to spend its grants in Africa, but when a Kenyan journalism group called ‘Africa 24’ won a grant, it was ordered to use it to pay agency salaries in DC.

The picture that emerges is of a gigantic, half-dead carcass, beset by a legion of bloodsuckers, parasites, fraudsters, DC chancers, Democrat staffers and donors, and all manner of the undeserving. No wonder Biden had to announce an extra 87,000 tax inspectors to keep the life support income stream flowing in one end, given the leaky, failing orifices gushing it out at the other.

Most outside the US remain unaware of the current corrupt reality of US politics, largely because of the ‘Whoops, got that wrong, who cares, it’s only Trump’ approach of the media elites.

Extraordinary, under-reported stories abound; what do we know of the Butler shooter and his multiple devices with foreign apps? Crickets. This is a black era for US journalism.