Conservative comedian and commentator Steven Crowder has begun a new segment on his YouTube channel called “Crowder Confronts,” where he and his team will do what the mainstream media won’t, and actually call a person out for their slander or calls for violence where everyone can see it.

Too often, the media’s leftist bent will cause it to ignore things that a leftist or protected group would do, yet wouldn’t dream of allowing anyone on the right to get away with. One of the things it tends to ignore is the constant calls for violence against the right from the left.

During one of Crowder’s “Change My Mind” segments on the fact that there are only two genders, an angry transgender individual posted Crowder’s location and suggested people do him harm, and destroy his property in order to teach him a lesson. Naturally, this didn’t sit well with Crowder and his crew, who found the trans individual and proceeded to ask him in person why he said what he said.

The entire episode made waves and prompted Jessi Cape of the Austin Chronicle to “report” on the incident. I put “report” in quotations because what she really wrote was an opinion piece laced with inaccuracies that she attempted to pass off as actual reporting titled “JuiceLand Employee Harassed by Right-Wing Comedian.”

The journalist accused Crowder of releasing the location of the transgendered individual’s job (he didn’t, she did in her post), and accused him of being alt-right (Crowder is shown on multiple occasion to denouncing the alt-right on his channel). Cape neglected to post the video I posted above to her article, which is the video she was writing about and omitted key details about the video in her article to make Crowder appear more like a villain. She also claims to have reached out to Crowder but instead contacted a line at CRTV who Crowder is affiliated with, but does not work for.

Crowder confronted Cape with her inaccuracies over the phone and received interesting responses to his statement of facts. For one, Cape repeatedly told Crowder that the facts — such as the fact that he’s not alt-right — were just his opinion. Crowder goes through the details Cape omitted, and at the end summarized Cape’s horrid lack of journalistic integrity.

This video is important, not just because it was fun to watch, but because this is the sad state of journalism in 2018. Cape fell into the bad habit of believing that her opinion is fact and that Crowder’s actual facts were just opinions. This belief that her politics are the politics of truth allowed Cape to write her story and call it journalism.

The question is, where does Cape get the hubris to end up at that conclusion? Crowder is quite literally showing her that she is factually incorrect, and yet Cape either can’t or won’t recognize that she had committed journalistic malpractice. This would have been completely forgivable if she was writing an op-ed, but she wasn’t. As she tells Crowder, she considers herself a journalist and what she was reporting was what actually happened. All statements to the contrary are just “opinion.”

Subscribing to a political philosophy does not automatically make you more correct than someone else when it comes to storytelling. Journalists are human and are bound to get things wrong from time to time for a plethora of reasons. However, having the facts handed to you on a silver platter after making little effort to get the facts, and STILL denying the facts once you’ve been confronted with them is the exact opposite of being a journalist.

That makes you an ideological activist. Cape is definitely one, and sadly there are too many like her in today’s media, especially in the mainstream parts of it.

And then they wonder why people trust the media less and less.