Earlier this week I found myself cuddled up on the couch with my toddler watching a “Nixon”-movie double-feature. I needed a break from “Peppa Pig.” The first was “The Post,” a Spielbergian telling of “The Pentagon Papers” and its pseudo-sequel “All the President’s Men,” which carved Woodward and Bernstein into American history.

Both are unintentionally hilarious, cast as they are in the present by a dark irony that only I really could laugh at. The Toddler laughed with me, but what does she know?

I know many Americans saw Trump’s election and his ensuing presidency as the darkest days they’ve ever lived and could ever imagine. We are slowly finding that, while there certainly were dubious behavior and even undeniably scandalous actions taken by Trump and his minions, the end of the Republic it was not. At its worst it was still business as usual for the Beltway grifters we call our elected leadership.

Nonetheless, that perception of the villainous Orange Man has been carefully cultivated and drilled into our heads almost ritualistically ever since the institutional media realized how far Trump had been able to propel himself with the billions of dollars of free advertising they had been giving him.

Recently, one of their own took a step back and studied their coverage in the Trump era. Its findings undermine a great many narratives we have been sold in recent years. Most critically, it has revealed how imperiled our precious “Democracy” has become since the 4th Estate rationalized taking a flamethrower to their own ideals to deliver the electoral outcomes they desired.

A lengthy report has been released by the Columbia Journalism Review, which studied the media’s behavior during the Trump era, and specifically called out their handling of the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was a colluding puppet of the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin. This modern retread of the Cold War era “Red Scare” ran roughshod over the American mind for years. The ensuing derangement brought with it endless investigations, hearings, special councils, and breathless and truth-less reporting and editorializing by outright liars like California Congressman Adam Schiff and former CIA Director John Brennan.

The CJR found that the national media utterly abdicated their ethics and the virtue of objectivity in their endorsement of dubious narratives. For some reason, hearing that what has been clear to me about the “Steel Dossier” and many other shaggy dog stories has also been clear to Bob Woodward this whole time doesn’t make me feel better about our current circumstances.

If Bob was so certain of his assessment of the Steele Dossier, why did he keep his skepticism behind closed doors? Why not bring it to the fore so that the public could see skepticism rather than blind acceptance for accusations such as those made in that document?

Because old Bob knew the score and hated Trump and his milieu just as much as his fellows charging forward to maliciously champion the lie. He didn’t care if it was true anymore than they did. The only goal the institutional press had was expurgating Trump from the presidency and from public life. They succeeded to a degree, but that’s why it’s so maddening and stultifying to hear such concessions and retrospection at this late hour.

This time three years ago we were in the middle of impeachment proceedings largely motivated because Trump had the temerity to lean on Saint Zelensky to motivate him to maybe just maybe have a second look into the obvious corruption and influence peddling perpetuated by the Biden family in his country. No wonder the Ukranian leader seems to get everything he asks for down to the last Abrams tank.

The complete shift of the institutional press from rabid warriors of the 4th Estate to their current form as dutiful stenographers for the Biden Administration was predictable and necessary. How else could a shambling wreck such as this sustain itself without a bulwark of Pravda?

The Bidens had been able to skate on their various scandals and scoops throughout the 2020 election and the first year of the regime thanks to the support of Federal Bureaucrats who initiated a censorship loop around the stories online.

Further reporting by Matt Taibbi on “The Twitter Files” has revealed information laundering by Hamilton ’68, a project that was used to slime many innocent individuals and Twitter accounts as nefarious agents of the Russian FSB. Their Fugazzi sources turned out to just be one guy, but it was Hamilton ’68 cited by all too willing tech corporations and teary-eyed journalists still bitter about Hillary losing in 2016 to even know what due diligence means.

There’s a reason why NPR wrote about why they weren’t going to talk about a certain laptop of unknown origin instead of discussing why another journalistic outlet was being censored for reporting on it. In fact, most of the institutional press spent more time trying to debunk the narrative and obfuscate as much as possible, and you’re never going to believe who they were getting the answers to their homework from. That was sarcasm.

We’ve seen this shell game with anonymous sources before. Look no further than the “evolving” narrative around that mysterious balloon of unknown origin, fueled by anonymous sources that are clearly just the Administration itself improving into oblivion. This could explain why they can’t seem to get the story straight for more than five minutes, whether they are speaking to the nation directly or circling back through their Muppets in the press corp.

The whole point of the now cast aside virtue of journalistic objectivity was to avoid putting guardrails on a story that will lead those reading it toward a conclusion that isn’t their own. At the very least it ideally should lead them to a conclusion that serves the truth. Whatever that means in a world so consumed by relativistic thinking.

The public is no longer asked to think critically about anything the institutional press and the current regime tells them. Heck, I even saw the high school educator who taught me how to think critically sharing some think piece on social media written during the COVID era explaining why critical thinking was a bad thing and should only be undertaken by certain people. A strange thing to hear from the same person who with complete sincerity played an episode of the ’90s Sci-Fi classic “Babylon 5” in class to illustrate the methods and consequences of a propagandistic press.

The only way a person could possibly sit through that “State of the Union” and not come away questioning reality as it is being presented is by completely deleting “critical thinking” from your gray matter, which apparently a great many of us have done. One can believe that only Fox News is capable of journalistic malfeasance, but all that proves is that someone could sell you on World War III by just feeding your toxic positivity. So it goes.