New York Times building by wsifrancis, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

Self-awareness is important. It allows us to stay grounded and react to different situations with some basis of consistency in relation to our own actions.

Of course, our mainstream media have no self-awareness so you get ridiculous freak outs like this, which my colleague streiff covered yesterday.

NEW FRONT IN THE WAR ON THE PRESS: TRUMP allies say they have archived embarrassing posts by hundreds of employees of @nytimes, @washingtonpost, @CNN & others.

The TRUMP allies plan to disseminate the posts in response to coverage they consider unfair. https://t.co/UqKvjyxd6w

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) August 25, 2019

Now, I’ve been reliably told by many leftists on Twitter that if you don’t want controversial things you’ve said to be exposed, you should not say controversial things in the first place. Context, age, and time passed since said comments doesn’t matter. This was the standard applied to Kyle Kashuv, who you may recall was booted from Harvard after private racist comments he made when he was 15 were leaked. At no point did the media say “this is out of bounds” nor push back on the idea that such kinds of journalism are toxic to society and unfair.

In fact, the media reaction has been the complete opposite. They’ve perpetuated outrage journalism and weaponized it to attack their perceived political enemies. Whether it’s trying to destroy a high school kid for smirking at someone that was harassing him or doxxing a fork lift driver from New York because he made a joke video of Nancy Pelosi, there have been no boundaries at all from the liberal media. Worse, many press outlets have their own departments dedicated to this kind of nonsense, with CNN’s “KFile” being one of the more prominent.

Now that a conservative group headed by Arthur Schwartz is using their own tactics against them, they are suddenly crying foul though. On what basis? Well, they can’t really explain that given their own actions, so they just cast aside all self-awareness and pretend that what they are doing is somehow different.

Read this hilarious take from The New York Times and try not to spit your drink out.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH pic.twitter.com/wcD8nyOi1B

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) August 25, 2019

Fearless and fair coverage? What planet do these people live on? They’ve run literally thousands of anonymously sourced, slanderous stories over the past three years. Despite this, the Times feels it gets to be the moral arbiter of what does and doesn’t qualify as “reporting.” That’s laughable.

https://twitter.com/bob_malak/status/1165751012893704193?s=21

Essentially, every average citizen just trying to live their lives is fair game for outrage journalism and mobbing, but not journalists themselves because reasons.

Townhall’s Guy Benson made another good point about this. Namely, that just weeks ago, the media were out in force defending Joaquin Castro for doxxing Trump donors, claiming it was fair game and shrugging at complaints about the tactics.

Can’t help but wonder how many media folks & lefties who defended Joaquin Castro’s nasty little harassment hit list by shrugging, “hey, it’s public information” will find these tactics terrible, damaging etc.

Meanwhile, I maintain my anti-outrage-mob stance. https://t.co/oYze7sNcNV

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 25, 2019

What the media want to do is sit in their bubble and destroy everyone else while asserting some kind of made up special right by which they can’t be similarly attacked. Meanwhile, conservative media figures have been dealing with bad faith attacks from the mainstream press for decades. Heck, Media Matters exists expressly for this purpose and they are fluffed by outlets like CNN and MSNBC all the time.

If you’re a conservative journalist, you have been the target of this behavior by leftist “think tanks”—which are the same ones spoonfeeding reporters their scoops. So what these reporters are calling a “war on the press” is an admission they’ve been waging this war for years.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 25, 2019

Now, Trump and his campaign are preparing to fight back and the media want to change the rules again. Actually, to be clearer, they want two different set of rules of to be applied.

Take this “report” released just today, which is targeting In and Out Burger’s founders for giving the paltry sum of $15,000 to political causes the past few years.

The mysterious family behind In-N-Out has donated more than $15,000 to Trump and the GOP since 2016 https://t.co/H9cGOrCv79 via @businessinsider

— Emily Cohn (@emily_cohn) August 26, 2019

This “journalist” can target a family for simply giving political donations, but according to the liberal media, Emily Cohn herself is off limits. Nah, that’s not how this works. They came up with these new rules and they will be made to play by them.

"Also don't bring up our bad tweets because it's destroying the First Amendment" https://t.co/mT2FHq7oWY

— I didn't vote for him, so think of a new retort (@jtLOL) August 26, 2019

I hope we can one day exist as a society free from woke mobs, outrage journalism, and targeting of private citizens but today is not that day. Until the media back off, not once, but enough to show they’ve gotten the message, they are fair game. I hope the Trump campaign drops the hammer on these people. Expose all their secrets and give them a taste of the hell they’ve been applying to other people’s lives for decades. Perhaps then they’ll come to a realization that what they’ve been doing is wrong.

What the media won’t be allowed to do any longer is act out their hypocrisy without consequences.

I’ve got a new twitter! Please help by following @bonchieredstate.