Attorney General Bill Barr gave an exclusive interview to Townhall today, and absolutely no punches were pulled. In what was a candid performance while flying back to Washington D.C., Barr lit into the mainstream media, pointedly calling them liars while using the example of how they treated the recent riots as a prime example of their dishonest, dangerous behavior.

“They’re basically a collection of liars. Most of the mainstream media. They’re a collection of liars and they know exactly what they’re doing. A perfect example of that were the riots. Right on the street it was clear as day what was going on, anyone observing it, reporters observing it, it could not have escaped their attention that this was orchestrated violence by a hardened group of street fighting radicals and they kept on excluding from their coverage all the video of this and reporting otherwise and they were doing that for partisan reasons, and they were lying to the American people. It wasn’t until they were caught red-handed after essentially weeks of this lie that they even started feeling less timid,” Barr said on the flight back to Washington Friday afternoon.

Barr nails it here. The media spent months misleading the American people about what was going in cities like Portland, Chicago, New York, and Kenosha. Headlines blared the farcical phrase “mostly peaceful” as reporters stood in front of burning buildings to insist everyone was behaving. While the media had jumped the shark long before that, it was still next level gaslighting that no self-respecting journalistic outlet should have ever wanted to partake in.

Yet, CNN, MSNBC, the broadcast networks, and all the major newspapers gleefully joined in the scam, not because of some righteous crusade, but because they were all partisan hacks terrified that any adverse reporting on the rioting might hurt Joe Biden. In the end, everything comes back to defeating the orange man.

Barr continued along those lines in his interview.

“The press has dropped, in my view – and I’m talking about the national mainstream media – has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity and are political actors, highly partisan who try to shape what they’re reporting to achieve a political purpose and support a political narrative that has nothing to do with the truth. They’re very mendacious about it,” he continued. “It’s very destructive to our Republic; it’s very destructive to the Democratic system to have that, especially being so monolithic. It’s contributing to a lot of the intensity and partisanship.”

He’s right about how destructive this all is. If people can’t trust what the news is telling them, it only feeds into the division the country is currently seeing. There was never a time where the media was “fair.” But there was a time when you could at least count on them to report basic facts. Now, omission is the name of the game when it comes to their bias and they are all to happy to keep things going if they feel it benefits them politically.

The idea of a valuable “fourth estate” is gone and it’s not coming back. The media burned those bridges in pursuit of cheap, short-term political gains. Now they are paying the price, and no matter how much they wring  their hands and proclaim their superiority, no one buys it anymore. That even the Attorney General feels free to point that out is a sad testament to just how far the media have fallen.

(Please follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)