CBS News Present Leftists As ‘Experts’ To Smear Opponents

CBS News’ David Becker — who is falsely billed as a nonpartisan election expert — accused former President Donald Trump and X CEO Elon Musk of spreading “election disinformation.” While his allegations are unfounded, left-wing corporate media has a long-standing practice of trotting out so-called “experts” to discredit and undermine their political rivals on any topic they deem to be politically inconvenient for Democrats ahead of the election.

Becker accused Musk of “pushing some really inflammatory claims when it comes to voting” that are meant to make Americans “doubt our elections.”

“We’re seeing more election disinformation for sure. It’s coming from Donald Trump. It’s coming from Elon Musk. It’s coming from, we know, foreign adversaries like Russia, and Iran, and North Korea and China,” Becker said, claiming all the aforementioned parties were working to create doubt about election processes and outcomes.

“So when you see information on social media in particular, that triggers something within you, that seems to make you angry about the other side, all of us, as sophisticated media consumers, should pause and say, what is — maybe that anger is the product they’re trying to create. Maybe they’re getting paid, or they’re benefiting from creating that anger in us.”

Musk waded into the conversation, calling Becker “a liar through and through.”

“The very definition of disinformation,” Musk said in a post on X.

Becker didn’t explicitly clarify what so-called “misinformation” Musk has allegedly spread, though in the recent past Becker has criticized Musk for questioning whether our elections are secure from illegal immigrants voting. Republicans introduced the SAVE Act to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, which has been blocked by Democrats. Currently in order to register to vote in federal elections, prospective voters simply need to check a box affirming they are a citizen — yes, our “secure” elections hinge on the honor system.

It’s an inconvenient truth, one that Becker tried to dismiss by saying in a string of posts on X that “voting by non-citizens in federal elections is already illegal.”

(Drinking and driving is also illegal, but people die every year in car crashes caused by drunk drivers.)

Becker also recently maligned new rules passed by the Georgia State Election Board that are aimed at ensuring election results are accurate prior to certification. Becker’s commentary is part of the left-wing media’s push to discredit the three Republican board members who passed the rules and to silence legitimate concerns in Georgia about the state’s election procedures.

Becker suggested, while on CBS News, that the rules would allow single counties to refuse to certify election results, which would in turn delay the state from certifying the results before the deadline. Rule 183-1-12-.12 does not change the certification deadline and notes the 5:00 p.m. certification deadline on the Monday following the election.

But undermining and discrediting election-related information isn’t a new strategy for the propaganda press and its Democrat allies.

Ahead of the 2020 election, the New York Post dropped the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story, which implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business dealings. But the propaganda press trotted out 51 “former senior intelligence officials” claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” an assertion first touted by Politico’s Natasha Bertrand.

With the stamp of approval from the 51 “intelligence officials,” the corporate press dismissed the story as Russian propaganda, with NPR’s managing editor Terence Samuels notoriously saying the outlet would not cover the story because it was a “waste” of time.

Yet it wasn’t just the culmination of political and media pressure that all but silenced the story.

Meta’s Facebook infamously throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 after treating it as “potentially misinformation.” The laptop and its contents were true and were recently entered into court evidence by federal prosecutors in their trial against the president’s son.

A report from the Media Research Center showed that “17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket if they had known about at least one of the eight news stories that were suppressed by big tech and mainstream media outlets,” my colleague Jordan Boyd reported.

But the corporate media’s efforts were successful: they were able to undermine and discredit politically inconvenient information that would have otherwise damaged their preferred candidate’s chances of winning. And now they’re back to employing the same strategy.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2