Just before leaving for an international flight, I charged up my Kindle Fire in order to be able to edit a manuscript on the plane.

This is when I discovered that the Kindle Fire had helpfully signed me up to the Washington Post (motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness as We Smother Truth with a Pillow”) as my news source of choice.

This was mildly annoying but not normally worth writing about. At least in the sense that all my electronics have tried to stick me with some variant of a left-even-for-MSM news source at one time or another. (My phone takes the cake, as when I called to demand they unsubscribe me from their “choice” of news — ranging from CNN to HuffPo — and the rep tried to guilt me with “Do you not wish to stay informed?” This is when seven languages and a vast gutter vocabulary came in handy.)

But the featured article from the Washington Post (motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness, and That’s Why We Sponsor Earth Hour”) was this one: “As Trump ranted and rambled in Phoenix, his crowd slowly thinned.”

I don’t even know if what the report purports to tell us is true. In fact, I will never know because the loaded terms in the headline tell me the person reporting it is completely in the can for anti-Trump, and unable to think outside it.

Sure, Trump occasionally misspeaks, and sure people can get bored with a speech. But more importantly, the press is so relentlessly and insanely biased against anything Trump says or does that it’s sometimes impossible to figure out what they’re reporting on, other than whatever is inside their heads, pre-packaged and ready to “report.” From offhand comments on Russia to his comments on what happened in Charlottesville, it’s nearly impossible to divine what Trump says from how it’s written about. He could say the sky is blue and get coverage along the lines of “by not mentioning the white clouds, Trump encourages white supremacy.”

Look at that headline: “Ranted and rambled” are subjective word choices, implying a value judgement. Had Clinton or Obama given the exact same speech, the headline would have read “spoke passionately.” You know it, I know it, and in fact the whole nation knows it, at that sort of gut level where you don’t need to think about it.

There is no way a non-biased press would have used the “ranted and rambled” headline. It doesn’t happen. That headline by itself is a demonstration of incredible bias. That they think it is okay to use it tells you how far gone they are, how unable to check themselves. In fact, they turned on a WSJ editor who called for unbiased reporting on Trump. Note that he wasn’t calling for pro-Trump reporting. Again, that tells you everything you need to know about it.

In fact, starting back with his candidacy, the media has declared his campaign/presidency over every week like clockwork.

You’d think that Trump’s victory, so stunning that it surprised even those of us who wanted anything but to see Hillary win, would have caused the media to wake up — something along the lines of “wait, if this could happen, maybe things aren’t the way we expected” or “maybe there is a defect in our thought.” Or perhaps even “technology has made it so that we can no longer present a unified front in news, without people being able to see and judge for themselves.”

However, that is not what seems to have happened. Instead, what they do is come up with “scandal” after “scandal,” starting with the Russia collusion that ran as long as it possibly could on absolutely nothing, and “Trump encourages white supremacy,” which is sort of like seeing fumes and emanations and ultimately boils down to “Trump encourages white supremacy because he took away Hillary’s anointed and predicted memory.” This despite the fact that Hillary is not only very white, but is known to the country at large – if not to her rabid followers – as an unindicted felon.

It’s like the media has been in an enchanted sleep, as though a particularly ugly Snow White had fallen asleep under a spell and failed to note how the world changed around her as she slept.

The media has had forewarning aplenty, since the blogs first started reporting news seriously at least 16 years ago. (More, but 9/11 is when a lot of us found our way to alternative news sources.)

Perhaps as the book publishers did with ebooks – another intensely disruptive technology that seemed to trickle in and make no difference, until the penetration got enough that it did – they simply underestimated what was happening and are now in denial.

They had a process and a power, the ability by either commonality of belief or the sort of underhanded conspiracy like JournoList, to make a narrative out of the news, a narrative that always favored their leftist views.

They bragged in the past of how many points they could add to a candidate. But those points weren’t enough for Hillary. What’s more, people didn’t answer polls honestly when asked.

And yet instead of reassessing, they just keep trying more of the same or, by wildly projecting, saying that Trump supporters might harm them, this while deep-sixing coverage of the attack on Scalise by an anti-trump leftist because it doesn’t fit their narrative.

It’s as though they think if they only attack with enough force and vigor they’ll get the result they always got.

Like lab mice in a long-deserted lab, they keep pushing with their noses on the pellet dispenser, sure eventually it will dispense just what they want. Only they’re not as smart as lab rats. Lab rats adapt and learn. The biased press can only do the same thing over and over again, until all you can think of while watching them is: how long before they starve or start eating their fellows?