The legacy media just can’t help itself. The recipe is as old as time: select a conservative figure to hate, exaggerate their views, and then deploy the character assassination.
Take the latest “scandal” involving the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts. A piece in The Guardian this week insinuated that Roberts killed one of his neighbors’ dogs 20 years ago because it kept barking at night.
But here’s their evidence: Roberts allegedly told a few of his former colleagues in the office and at a dinner party twenty years ago that he used a shovel to silence a neighbor’s barking dog. It’s a flimsy line of evidence and hearsay at best. At worst, it’s an abject character assassination.
Roberts said the story is “patently untrue and baseless.”
But the real reason this story was written lies in the first paragraph.
“The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian,” the article reads.
The reason this story was written has nothing to do with a dog and everything to do with Roberts’ proximity, real or imagined, to Donald Trump. Project 2025, created by Roberts and the Heritage Foundation, was a creed outlining the effort to staff the Trump administration with Heritage-aligned individuals.
It’s really nothing out of the ordinary. A political organization doing political things. It’s only bad because Orange Man™, Republicans, and conservatives are all bad in the media’s mind.
Further down the story, The Guardian spoke with the neighbor whose dog they’re alleging Roberts killed. And guess what, he says he can’t say that Roberts did it. Only that the dog went missing and they never found her.
You’d think the story evaluation would stop there, but of course it doesn’t. The Guardian had a point to prove, an ax to grind, and a windmill to fell.
Rather than lean on tried and true principles of journalism, like verifying something happened, The Guardian runs with the flimsy evidence. It’s simply unreal.
I realize this political moment we’re in is especially light on patience and veracity — and heavy on conjecture and bad faith statements — but imagine if you were the one being accused of canicide, particularly based on this amount of hearsay.
It’s absurd and the legacy media should be better than this, but of course, it isn’t.
For five years now, The Texan has been doing what the legacy media refuses to do — embracing the classic journalistic virtues the mainstream media has tossed aside.