In an “Opinion” hit piece headlined, “Journalists seeking truth may not seem neutral. Why that’s okay in today’s political climate,” KQED’S/NPR’S San Francisco reporter Marisa Lagos has gone to great lengths to redefine the title “journalist” which she desperately believes she is, justifying her startling lack of understanding of the difference between reporting and editorializing. Lagos appears to be employing a corollary to President Biden’s widely mocked 2019 gaffe that “we choose truth over facts."

That this piece appeared in the once respected San Francisco Chronicle – and prominently features me as an example of why self-proclaimed “journalists” such as Ms. Lagos are entitled to stray from neutrality – is rather remarkable. If I have spoken to Ms. Lagos more than twice in my life I would be surprised, and the last time we spoke was approximately six months ago when I was a candidate for U.S. Senate. The May 17 piece prominently features me as a prime example of Ms. Lagos’ apparent personal struggles to fight to remain neutral in her reporting and why she is justified for not being neutral—or simply thorough.

Lagos contends that “in an era when one side of the political spectrum is not always operating in good faith I don’t think neutrality should be the final goal,” a thinly veiled declaration, unilaterally and without proof, that conservatives like me are intentionally or naively not operating in good faith. Lagos uses an interaction with me as an example of this alleged "not operating in good faith":

Recently, U.S. Senate candidate Eric Early, someone who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, was on my radio show. Early’s stance on the 2020 election is not an intellectually honest argument to make, even if many Americans agree with it: The facts don’t bear out. So, when I am in the studio with Early in that moment, it’s not my job to stay “neutral” and simply listen. It’s my job to question, to push back — and, yes, call out the lies when they are uttered. It doesn’t have to be confrontational or uncivil, but it is key to doing my job responsibly. 

This is where objectivity becomes key — the ability to set aside personal feelings or opinions and look at the facts, then make a judgment based on that information. Neutrality alone — the idea of not aligning yourself with one side — doesn’t cut it when you’re faced with someone who is lying, obfuscating or being intellectually dishonest, even if they believe what they’re saying. But it’s also a mistake to see objectivity in this kind of situation as taking a side, other than the side of the truth.

Lagos and her comrades in most of the media believe they know better than millions of Americans with whom they disagree - and better than peer-reviewed evidence showing fraud in that election. The rest of us must be acting in bad faith and/or are intellectually dishonest.

Ms. Lagos has to my knowledge never once “pushed back against falsehoods” (her words) routinely uttered by the scores of high-profile election deniers with whom she shares the same politics and ideology. Has Ms. Lagos, for example, ever once wrestled with her self-professed neutrality struggles, by writing about the “intellectual dishonesty” or simply, flat-out proven lies, of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest, who have spent years telling the world that Donald Trump was not legitimately elected in 2016? I doubt it. Not even after they were conclusively proven wrong by the Mueller Report, the Durham Report, and the Horowitz investigation.

There are millions of Americans, perhaps tens of millions, who like me, watched the Trump years closely, and know exactly why we believe the election was stolen. We witnessed live and in living color a four-year-long effort to disenfranchise Trump’s 70-plus million voters on a daily, moment-by-moment basis, as if we were all simply deplorable fools to be ignored and discarded. We know that nothing would stop that same group of proven liars from using their vast power to throw an election and then lie again by telling the world it was the most secure in American history. One lie after another that millions of us knew in real-time were wrong, illegal, flat-out false, or all three, including:

1. Obama/Biden/Clinton/Brennan investigating the Trump campaign in a manner that made Watergate look like Romper Room;
2. The years-long Russia hoax;
3. The sham impeachment of Trump based on his short call to Ukraine’s Zelinsky (which was Kindergarten stuff compared to Joe Biden’s bragging about how he had forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating Bursima, the company that employed Hunter, by threatening to withhold funds);
4. The letter from 51 intelligence professionals who knowingly and intentionally lied to the nation – just two weeks before the 2020 election -- that Hunter’s laptop had all the badges of Russian disinformation, which was lapped up as gospel by an intellectually dishonest media;
5. A 2016 presidential campaign featuring Joe Biden in his basement and Donald Trump speaking to hundreds of thousands of passionate supporters at rallies;
6. Universal mail-in ballots being introduced for the first time in American history, with millions of ballots scattered around the nation, which all common sense Americans knew would open the door for fraud;
7. The nation’s election counts in battleground states freezing in the wee hours following election day; and,
8. Thousands of Americans swearing in writing, under oath, that they personally witnessed wrongdoing during the election process – none of which evidence was ever adjudicated on the merits, with the lawsuits challenging the election dismissed on standing, mootness, or similar grounds.

Lagos wrestles with her inner ideological demons as she states: “Because the role of a journalist is to seek, uncover and deliver the truth. Without fear or favor. Without my own beliefs getting in the way. Even if, in this moment, it is harder than ever.” Really? She has no trouble telling her “truth” from the pages of the Chronicle.  What is hard is telling the other truth. Case in point: Uri Berliner, who has been banished after 25 years at NPR, for outing NPR (and by extension most of the mainstream media) stating, “without fear or favor”:

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.   

Ms. Lagos’ piece follows the NPR playbook to a tee; this while KQED appears to be cratering. Here’s a shocker: All conservatives knew about the NPR playbook for years before Mr. Berliner outed them. And of course, the playbook continues to be followed by the media writ large.

Being ‘neutral’ would mean dishing out the same level of contention to all the subjects you cover, not just those with whom you disagree. Marisa Lagos’ column succeeded in one vital area: Knowing her predilection for ‘feelings over facts,” no one should ever take her seriously again.

(Eric Early is an attorney and a former Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from California.)