On the desk of L. E. Edwardson, a city editor at the Chicago Herald and Examiner in the early 20th century, sat a framed note saying, “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news.” To put the saying in contemporary terms, whatever the liberal elite wants printed is propaganda; whatever it wants suppressed is news.

That definition of news usually impedes the work of conservative journalists, but it occasionally upends the work of reporters like Ronan Farrow and Amy Robach, too. The liberal elite didn’t want Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, both friends to the Clintons and countless other lefties, exposed.

Both ABC and NBC have claimed that the stories of Farrow and Robach didn’t meet their “editorial standards.” What a crock. They have no standards, save double ones. Both ABC and NBC beclowned themselves with phony-as-hell stories about Trump–Russia collusion. Yet they lacked evidence to say that Weinstein and Epstein were dirtballs?

The Project Veritas footage of Robach musing on why her story about Epstein was blocked by ABC captures the only real editorial standard there: access. ABC didn’t want to lose access to all the lefties, including the Clintons, Bill Gates, and the British royals, Epstein had cultivated. In Farrow’s case, NBC didn’t want to lose access to Harvey Weinstein’s constellation of stars and cronies in the liberal firmament.

It is funny how Matt Lauer has ended up paying the unpaid bills of the craven NBC executives who stiffed Farrow. They had to make an example of Lauer, a garden-variety womanizer but not a rapist, in order to compensate for their derelict coverage of Weinstein. So those same executives who claimed that Farrow lacked the requisite sources to expose Weinstein now call Lauer a rapist on the say-so of a woman who dated him for months. If Lauer had had any sense, he would have gone on offense immediately against the phonies at NBC and pointed out that all of them knew about his tomcatting and were simply punishing him in an attempt to erase their guilt for killing the Weinstein story. Instead, a shell-shocked Lauer cowered before the same PC gods who made him, and he is now henceforth considered a “rapist.”

Notice that Farrow’s latest comment — that Juanita Broaddrick’s rape charge against Bill Clinton deserves a hearing — has been completely ignored by all the same folks who say NBC was wrong to block him. Come to think of it, wasn’t it NBC that had that story too? Lisa Myers, as I recall, had the story but ran into the same resistance Farrow felt.

In the age of Trump, the media will run with the wildest hearsay — recall ABC’s Brian Ross causing the stock market to crater after reporting BS about Michael Flynn — while hesitating over the most obviously true stories about liberal dirtbags. The frauds at ABC, the same ones who encouraged the rodent-like Ross, have extracted from Robach a kind of confession note, that what Project Veritas captured was merely a fleeting moment of “frustration.” Right. If you watch the whole video, it is clear Robach regards her bosses as cowardly weenies who let a massive story go out the door, all so that they could keep getting interviews with the Clintons and “William and Kate.”

The pressure applied to preventing a story from appearing is usually in direct proportion to its newsworthiness. Were there any real newsmen at ABC and NBC, the Weinstein and Epstein stories would have been told many years ago. But nothing even remotely resembling news exists anymore on those channels. It is all just entertainment and propaganda. Usually, the programming is ratings-driven, but not always, as evident in their crashingly boring, low-ratings “impeachment” coverage. Over at CNN, which is nothing more than a nonstop anti-Trump infomercial, the ratings remain anemic, and its maestro is an ex-Today Show producer, Jeff Zucker. Liberal ideology sometimes trumps even avarice.

NBC once turned Chelsea Clinton into a “reporter,” along with one of the Bush girls, Jenna. ABC turned Clinton’s communications director, George Stephanopoulos, into an “anchor,” which proved a seamless transition for him. As Ronan Farrow and Amy Robach have learned, at shops like those real reporters need not apply.