Ben Johnson – TheWashingtonStand.com
Christians take fulfilling their civic duties seriously, but acting as conscientious citizens requires wisdom and knowledge. We gain wisdom from the Bible, but all too often, we fail to gain knowledge from the news media. In the place of accurate information, the aggressively secularist legacy media serves up mounds of narrative spun into gossamer-thin premises suffused with liberal “context.” Instead of “news stories,” the media offer Americans “non-stories” designed to manipulate the populace into pliantly adopting left-wing policies.
These were the top 10 non-stories of 2024.
1. Women Dying from ‘Abortion Bans’/Pro-Life Laws Ban ‘Miscarriage Care’
This summer, Vice President Kamala Harris hoped exploiting the deaths of two women from incomplete abortions would breathe life into her presidential campaign. While it could not revive her electoral fortunes, it resuscitated the abortion industry’s founding lie: that pro-life laws kill, while abortion saves lives.
On September 16, the Soros-funded news outlet ProPublica broke the story of 28-year-old Amber Thurman’s death, followed two days later by the story of 41-year-old Candi Miller. Both women had undergone a chemical abortion, taking the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol, and both lived in Georgia, which protects life from the moment doctors can detect a fetal heartbeat, approximately six weeks. That was enough for the abortion industry to make a blood libel against the pro-life movement.
“We know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know — here in the state of Georgia — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” fibbed Harris during a campaign stop in late September. She led the crowd in chanting “Amber Nicole Thurman,” claiming, “Under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed.”
In fact, both women died from two side effects of the abortion industry: incomplete abortion from mifepristone that led to sepsis and misinformation from the abortion lobby that led to confusion and death. Although chemical abortion often leaves part of the child’s fetal tissue inside the mother’s womb, the abortion industry hands out potentially fatal pills and abandons women to their fate, typically without a follow-up. Thurman developed sepsis, and a hospital in Georgia — perhaps believing pro-abortion misinformation that removing her fetal remains through a dilation and curettage procedure would violate state law — turned her away. She began vomiting blood and died from the abortion pill’s complications on August 19, 2022.
Miller developed complications from an incomplete abortion, suffered excruciating pain for days, and died on November 12, 2022, with her three-year-old daughter by her side. She explicitly believed the abortion industry’s disinformation. “Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor ‘due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions,’” reported ProPublica.
The clearest analysis would pin the blame on the abortion industry. The legacy media immediately parroted the Democrats’ spin that conservative Christians killed innocent women. MSNBC predictably rolled out a news story charging, “How Georgia’s LIFE Act killed Amber Thurman,” but widely read news sources did so as well. “Two Georgia deaths are tied to abortion restrictions. Experts say abortion pills they took are safe,” claimed the Associated Press. “Georgia’s abortion ban linked to Amber Thurman’s death in ProPublica investigation,” stated USA Today. “Amber Thurman was killed by Georgia’s abortion ban. There will be others,” assured The Guardian.
In fact, not a single pro-life state outlaws miscarriage care or forces women to be near death before providing treatment. This is in part due to the obvious fact that treating a miscarriage does not take a human life; it saves one, unlike abortion. To dispel all confusion, Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) asked lawyer Heather Hacker under oath:
Lankford: Ms. Hacker, just to clarify on this, are there any states where women face prosecution for having an abortion?
Hacker: No.
Lankford: Are there any states that criminalize miscarriage?
Hacker: No.
Lankford: Or the care for any for a miscarriage?
Hacker: No.
Lankford: Are there any states that criminalize removing an ectopic pregnancy?
Hacker: No.
Lankford: Are there any states that prohibit lifesaving care for the mother?
Hacker: No.
Lankford: Are there any states where women have to be actively dying for a doctor to be able to act for her care?
Hacker: No.
Republican governors sought to dispel the confusion engendered by the abortion industry’s misinformation. Florida, under pro-life Governor Ron DeSantis (R), sent a guidance to doctors on September 19 clarifying, “a miscarriage is not an abortion.” (Emphasis in original.) The “Notice to Health Care Providers Regarding Misinformation About Abortions in Florida” also noted, under Section 390.011(1) of state law, doctors may carry out a procedure in which an unborn child will lose its life if it is necessary “at any point in pregnancy to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” (Emphasis in original.) Yet the misinformation persists.
The abortion-media complex’s campaign to transfer its guilt in two women’s deaths to the pro-life movement constitutes the greatest act of moral Judo in 2024. But its falsehood merely renewed a longstanding abortion tactic. Back-alley abortionists cited their own victims’ deaths to legalize abortion in the 1960s and 1970s. The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist who founded the group then known as NARAL (now rebranded as “Reproductive Freedom for All”) came clean after he became pro-life and converted to Catholicism. Dr. Nathanson admitted the abortion industry lied when it “claimed to have data that supported a figure of five thousand” women dying every year from illegal abortions. The actual number of women who died from illegal abortion in 1972 was 39 — while 24 women died from “safe and legal” abortion that year. The same back-alley abortionists who maimed and killed women before Roe v. Wade continued to do so after legalization.
Curiously, the abortion industry — which insisted women would die from carrying out their own abortions — immediately encouraged women in pro-life states to stock up on mifepristone and engage in self-managed abortions, often alone on the toilet. The abortion pill has claimed the lives of 26 women and had more than 4,000 documented adverse effects when administered legally.
Of all the overreported stories of 2024, this may be the most toxic, because it is not only false, it is the opposite of the truth. The abortion industry’s abortion-and-abandonment business model will create many more Amber Thurmans and Candi Millers.
2. Kamala Harris Wins Iowa
Just three days before the 2024 election, the Kamala Harris campaign got a massive psychological boost, as a new poll purported to show Harris winning the blood-red state of Iowa by three points. “Iowa Poll: Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day. Here’s how,” reported the Des Moines Register on November 2.
“She has clearly leaped into a leading position,” pollster J. Ann Selzer informed the paper. “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming.” Selzer accurately predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 and nearly predicted his share of the state’s vote in 2020.
The poll’s specifics were more shocking: Kamala Harris’s greatest support came from senior citizens, those over the age of 65. Older women supported Harris “by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.” (The story also highlighted an 18-year-old woman who “likes Harris’ stance on abortion rights.”)
For Republicans, the report immediately seemed fishy. Donald Trump won Iowa by six points in 2016 and eight points in 2020. Neither party bothered campaigning in the state in 2024. For Democrats, it seemed the Kamala Harris campaign — which overpromised it would fill liberals with “joy” — may have finally delivered. And credulous readers read the report as proof that the 2024 presidential race remained up for grabs.
The legacy media immediately cited the poll as proof of a Kamala Harris surge. “New polling shows the candidates are still locked in an extremely tight race amid signs that late-deciding persuadable voters are breaking towards Harris,” claimed CNN’s Dana Bash. “Experts widely see that poll as reputable,” said Dasha Burns on “Meet the Press” that Sunday. “Even if Ms. Harris doesn’t win in Iowa, which has only six electoral votes, the idea that she may be making gains in a Midwestern state could give Democrats hope for her chances in battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan,” reported a hopeful New York Times. Phil Boas of The Arizona Republic said the poll showed, “Abortion may have changed Iowa’s poll results.”
Then came election day, when the Kamala Harris surge went the way of the Walter Mondale surge and the Michael Dukakis surge. Trump crushed Harris in Iowa by a 12-point margin, 56% to 42.7%. The president’s greatest margin of victory came among women and older voters, according to ABC News exit polls (which had issues of their own).
The results exposed Selzer’s poll as “probably the most ridiculous thing that ever happened in the industry,” said Mark Mitchell, chief pollster for Rasmussen Reports. When Selzer released the poll “on the weekend before election day, just to satiate the Democrat need for some kind of good news … she burned her credibility,” Mitchell told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” at the time.
With Trump’s Iowa landslide, Selzer’s poll seems either a sudden outburst of incompetence or election interference. In a November 17 post on Truth Social, President-elect Trump dismissed the survey as a “totally [f]ake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing.” A month later, he sued Selzer, her polling firm, and the Des Moines Register for publishing “election-interfering fiction.”
“I’m mystified about what motivation anyone thinks I had to act unethically in such a public poll,” Selzer told local public media. By shifting questions to her motives (which, like most people’s, are typically manifold and inscrutable), she seemingly concedes any substantive defense of her work.
If Selzer is guilty of using polls to manipulate the electorate, she’s far from alone. ABC News and NBC News gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead in the popular vote, and CBS News showed the two candidates tied near election day. In the end, Trump beat Harris by two million votes.
The Harris-Walz campaign apparently profited handsomely from such deception. David Plouffe, a senior adviser on the Harris campaign who has close ties to Barack Obama, admitted the campaign’s internal polls never showed Harris leading President Trump nationally. “We were behind” the entire race, he told the November 26 episode of the blasphemously named “Pod Save America” podcast. “[T]here was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” Plouffe confessed.
Despite knowing the campaign faced certain defeat, the Harris-Walz campaign spent a near-record $1.5 billion and ended the season $20 million in debt. Her campaign continued sending fundraising solicitations to its donors into December, although filings with the Federal Election Commission show the campaign still has $1.8 million on hand.
Kamala Harris’s campaign finances prove Iowa isn’t the only place where the numbers don’t add up.
3. Joe Biden’s Sudden Mental Decline
After Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate against Donald Trump, the legacy media began admitting the undeniable truth: Joe Biden’s mental acuity had slipped. Yet they couched these stories as though the decline had only just begun.
The Los Angeles Times celebrated the Fourth of July by telling readers of “notable signs in recent weeks” of Biden’s mental decline. The Washington Post held to the same time line one day later, reporting that the then-81-year-old president “displayed signs of accelerated aging in recent months, said numerous aides, foreign officials, members of Congress, donors and others who have interacted with Biden over the last 3 1/2 years, noting that he moves more slowly, speaks more softly and has moments when he loses his train of thought more often than even just a year ago.” Three days earlier, The New York Times noted, “by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3 1/2 years ago,” in a story titled “Biden’s lapses are said to be increasingly common and worrisome.” The Wall Street Journal, which precipitated the avalanche in early June, recounted inside tips from Democrats who “described a president who appears slower now,” especially “[o]ver the past year.” Historian and liberal partisan Douglas Brinkley would allow only that “there’s been a slowdown in the past two years.”
Even as the stories broke, Biden administration sycophants gave the president the kind of coverage usually restricted to North Korean media. “He’s inquisitive. Focused. He remembers. He’s sharp,” swore Neera Tanden, the former CEO of the Center for American Progress and a Biden adviser, in July. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough insisted, “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. … If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”
But the debate removed all plausible deniability (to use Biden’s phrase). Eventually, under internal party pressure and significant duress, Joe Biden quit the presidential race on July 21 and endorsed Kamala Harris.
The truth began to trickle out. The Wall Street Journal has revealed that the “protective culture” supposedly drawn up during the 2020 campaign to insulate Biden from COVID-19 “intensified” the moment he began “his” presidency; that Biden held fewer than half as many full Cabinet meetings as Barack Obama or Donald Trump in an average four years; that Biden’s inner circle made him so inaccessible that Cabinet secretaries “dealt with the president’s advisers, not the president himself.”
A suspicious person might conclude these advisers collectively served as acting president for the last four years.
The scandal in this story is not just that the media gaslighted the American people. It’s that they tried to present Biden’s decline as recent. As Biden would say, “C’mon, man.”
Even fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Julián Castro raised the topic at the third 2020 Democratic primary debate — on September 13, 2019. Castro greeted Biden’s self-contradiction about whether someone had to “buy in” to his proposed socialized medicine program by asking: “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I mean, I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.” (The transcript shows Biden did, in fact, contradict himself.)
Questions about Biden’s mental acuity should have flooded the nation by June 2022, when photographers caught him clutching a card marked “Sequence of Events” which instructed him:
- “YOU enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants.
- YOU take YOUR seat.
- Press enters.
- YOU give brief comment (2 minutes).
- Press departs.
- YOU ask Liz Shuler, President, AFL-CIO, a question (NOTE: Liz is joining virtually.)
- YOU thank participants.
- YOU depart.”
By then, no one could have been surprised by the commander-in-chief’s creeping senility. Biden regularly described recent conversations with long-dead European leaders, warned that he would “get in trouble” with staffers if he took questions, attempted to shake hands with nobody, wandered around erratically when he was able to find his way off a stage or out of a room, and occasionally had to be stage-managed by the Easter Bunny.
The American people noticed the decline long ago — and the legacy media tried to deny the reality of their own eyes then, too. “Is Biden’s Stutter Being Mistaken for ‘Cognitive Decline?’” asked the journal of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism in 2020. They bizarrely accused Special Counsel Robert Hur of partisanship earlier in the year when he did not charge Biden with illegally keeping classified documents in his home, because the jury would see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” NBC News went further, insisting, “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”
The legacy media obsessed over President Trump’s Diet Coke consumption for the same reason they concealed Biden’s creeping dementia: They feared the truth would puncture the tissue-thin shibboleths that maintain the Left’s grasp on power. There are many names for such a thing. Journalism is not one of them.
4. Donald Trump Is a Fascist, Nazi Rabble-Rouser, and Unique Threat to Democracy
The Left spent eight years portraying President Donald Trump as the most dangerous, incipient dictator ever to arise on American soil. “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms,” declared Harris’s social media account on June 17. But with the opportunity for heads to cool after a near-fatal assassination attempt against the 45th president in July, the Democratic Party chose to make its portrayal of Trump as a tinpot Hitler its central theme.
The Democratic Party platform initially toned down the rhetoric. The final version of the 2024 Democratic Party platform changed the sentence “Trump is a greater danger to democracy than ever” to “Trump refuses to defend core tenets of our democracy: the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of checks and balances.” In two other instances, the platform changed the word “threat” to a mildly softer, but still democracy-threatening, alternative.
But the Harris-Walz campaign’s internal polls never showed the vice president defeating Trump (see above), so Harris cranked up the Nazi campaign rhetoric to 11. “Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris at an October CNN town hall. “Yes, I do,” she replied, hardly allowing Cooper to finish his question.
When Donald Trump had the temerity to hold a campaign rally in deep-blue New York City, vice presidential candidate Walz asserted, “There’s a direct parallel” between Trump’s MSG event and “a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.” Hillary Clinton accused Trump of “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939,” as others piled on.
Harris’s closing campaign tried to assert the 2024 election amounted to a choice between Adolf Hitler and Corrie ten Boom (except that ten Boom agreed with the statement “Jesus is Lord”). “Donald Trump has openly vowed, if reelected, he’ll be a dictator on day one,” she yelled. She gesticulated wildly as sheperformed one facism-themed set-piece: “Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States of America should never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States of America.” She concluded with the Holocaust-era slogan, “Never again!”
“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” stated Trump, specifically highlighting their claim that he was a “threat to democracy” during his debate with Harris on September 10. Five days later, he would nearly take a bullet again.
The Trump-Mussolini comparison always lacked any basis save the accuser’s seething hatred of Trump. It sounded shriller after Democratic officials attempted to ban Trump from the ballot in numerous states in the name of democracy. That coincided with Joe Biden’s attempts to transfer student loan debt from its holders to U.S. taxpayers even after the Supreme Court struck down previous attempts, as well as his efforts to bar homeowners from evicting tenants who refuse to pay the rent. It preceded the DNC’s decision to quash Biden’s opposition in the 2024 primaries, then replace him with an unelected candidate at the convention (as this writer predicted) — all of which came after the Democratic Party empowered a Shadow Government of unelected advisers and Cabinet officials to run the government in Biden’s mental absentia.