There were certainly a lot of candidates for the biggest story of 2019, from the red-hot economy to the Mueller mumblings to the president’s record pace in reshaping the judiciary. But, my vote for the biggest story of 2019 is the complete collapse of media credibility along with its continued poisonous influence.

The media sold its soul to the Democrats long ago, but 2019 was its worst year on record. Consider a few of the worst offenses.

Exhibit A

A Washington Post headline declared that slain ISIS leader and hardened terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghadi an “austere religious scholar.” Nothing to see here other than another charming chap in horn-rimmed glasses. They simply did not have it in them to celebrate a major U.S. achievement that reflected positively on the president they hate.

Showing that they never learn from their mistakes, this week’s headline from the same paper declared that the world’s worst terrorist, Qasem Soleimani, who ran Iran’s terrorist and intelligence networks with the blood of scores of Americans on his hands, was Iran’s “most revered military leader.”

The media are going to need to open a reverential hall of fame to celebrate the likes of al-Baghadi, Soleimani, and the “peaceful protestors” who tried to Benghazi the embassy in Iraq. CNN, for its part, is doing its usual effort to paint this in the most anti-Trump light, with an entire story dedicated to the fact that President Donald Trump dined on ice cream when news of the strike broke, perhaps with a side of Chianti.

Exhibit B

The media left the reality-based planet when a few West Point cadets and Navy midshipmen were playing a silly game that involved making circles with their hands at the annual Army-Navy game.

HuffPost headline: “Military Investigating After Cadets Flashed Apparent White Power Signs Before Army-Navy Game.” CBS, NBC, The USA Today and the media herd smelled blood. Anyone with an IQ over 12 knew this wasn’t a white supremacy act. In fact, if you were really looking for this nearly extinct phenomenon, one of the last places you would scour would be the service academies.

And yet the mainstream media, showing that there is not a single American tradition or institution not worth destroying, saw future military officers as welcome targets. Perhaps they were infuriated that the students cheered their commander-in-chief at the game.

The media’s behavior was beyond abhorrent. Without even a shred of evidence, they slandered young men who signed on to defend them, accusing them of some of the worst behavior imaginable, plastering their picture all over the news. In a saner world, media figures that took part in this horror show would be summarily fired to live out their days in disgrace.

This was Covington redux, one of the great media malfunctions that set the tone for the year last January. At this point, any media story alleging a racist act should be immediately discarded until there is strong evidence to the contrary since the media’s rush to breathlessly publicize all of these has created a cottage industry of fake hate crimes.

Exhibit C

How in the tank is NBC anchor Chuck Todd for the Democrats? He enthusiastically read from a letter that said, “Why do people support Trump? It's because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales... Show me a person who believes in Noah's ark and I will show you a Trump voter.”

The media dump barrels of ink and shred precious airtime pondering how anyone could possibly support the president. But, Todd deciphered the Trump code by mixing a dash of Noah with a pound of fairy tale dust.

He followed this up by indicating that some voters like to be lied to, by which he meant all Trump voters. This is someone who the media pretends is a respected journalist hitting a triple by partaking in the media’s three favorite pastimes; declaring the intellectual superiority of liberals, attacking Christians and people of faith, and disparaging Trump voters. If he was a real journalist, the mother of all fairy tales was right in front of him -- the Russian collusion fabrication to cover up an ongoing coup attempt to remove a duly elected president, a fairy tale that he and his merry band of NBC Democrats have gleefully advanced. He could also have debunked the “fairy tale” of Brett Kavanaugh as a crazed sexual predator.

That the media is at war with half of America is of no consequence to Todd and his compatriots who continue to intensify their attacks on the people they despise.

Exhibit D

Lamenting that the singular focus of the New York Times newsroom around “Russia, Russia, Russia” failed to achieve its desired effect, NYT executive editor Dean Baquet promised to do better by weaponizing the newsroom around writing about “race in a thoughtful way” by means of the 1619 Project, which is intended to replace the consensus view of American history with one in which slavery and racism become the focus of the entire American saga. This is somehow supposed to accomplish what the Russian collusion story failed to do.

There are many other examples, but they all amount to the same phenomenon; the media is consumed with an incurable form of madness. That the media would hate a Republican politician is neither special nor unexpected. They are equal opportunity Republican haters. They hated Ronald Reagan. They hated both Bushes. They hate Devin Nunes. They despised Sarah Palin, who was perhaps treated worse than any other politician on record pre-Trump.

But, this president chose to do something that Republican politicians have been hesitant to do in the past. He punched back. And it has driven the media into removing even the thinnest veneer of professionalism or impartiality. That the media no longer disguises their hatred of America and Americans is one of the president’s great public services.

Unfortunately, even at that, the media still matters. At least half of the country live in a media-induced fog and are oblivious to the stories that the media blacked out in the interest of protecting Democrats. This is also why justice rarely visits Democrats.

A friend recently marveled to me that President Trump’s approval rating was not pushing north of seventy percent considering the remarkable strength of the economy. That’s the media effect. One can equally wonder how Trump’s approval rating is as high as it is with negative media coverage of him and his administration easily topping 90 percent. If enough people really believed the media, no Republican could even be elected town sewage monitor.

As bad as the media were in 2019, they will be worse in 2020. But, despite their best efforts to terminate the president, he’ll be back. And that is the most important prediction for 2020.

Fletch Daniels can be found on twitter @fletchdaniels.