The jig is up, as the bad guys used to say in the movies.

When Rachel Maddow told her MSNBC audience on the night of the Iowa Republican caucuses that she would not be showing the victory speech by decisive winner Donald Trump, I started writing this column in my head.

What arrogance, I thought. Whether MSNBC likes Trump or not, if they claim to be journalists, they can’t refuse to air obviously newsworthy events merely because it makes them unhappy. That’s not how actual journalists even think. But of course, that’s exactly what they have been doing for two decades, and CNN right alongside them. They have been the self-appointed “Gatekeepers” of news and information for their millions of viewers.

Maddow claimed that her network’s decision was not out of spite, but instead was the network not wanting to be broadcasting “untrue things” that Trump might say (and remember, he hadn’t said anything yet). But the Gatekeepers are only concerned about protecting the public from certain kinds of viewpoints. You know, the views of Republicans. They freely allow misstatements by Democrats to go unchallenged.

One blatant example occurred on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Jan. 21 when Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas said in 2020, “You had the president telling the country to inject itself with bleach to fight COVID.” Wrong! Absurd and defamatory! But the Gatekeepers allowed it to air unchallenged.

On the same program, host Dana Bash twice ruled Trump’s questioning of Nikki Haley’s constitutional eligibility to run for president to be out of bounds.

“He suggested she is ineligible to be president, even though she is. She was born in your home state of South Carolina,” she told Sen. Tim Scott, but neglected to mention that both of Haley’s immigrant parents were not citizens yet.

That “suggests” that Bash doesn’t know the difference between “native born” and “natural born,” – or that Constitutional scholars debate as to why that might (or might not) be significant – and isn’t interested in learning about it. If the Framers had wanted to say that the president must be born in the United States, they could have done so by saying it directly. Instead, they said only a “natural born” citizen was eligible to be president. A few minutes’ research on the Internet will confirm that the phrase “natural born” carried a very distinct meaning when........

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