An unintentionally hilarious Philadelphia Inquirer article breathlessly reports on a brave journalist who's not afraid to take on President Donald Trump. "Scott Pelley once again is doing what network evening-news anchors generally don't do: abandoning careful neutrality in favor of pointed truth telling," the report begins. 

Let's just take a moment and appreciate that the writer of this piece believes journalists typically cultivate "careful neutrality." But it gets better. The piece describes some of Pelley's "pointed truth telling" -- for example, this tirade:

"It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality. Mr. Trump said this morning that any polls that show disapproval of his immigration ban are fake. He singled out a federal judge for ridicule after the judge suspended his ban, and Mr. Trump said that the ruling now means that anyone can enter the country. The president's fictitious claims, whether imaginary or fabricated, are now worrying even his backers, particularly after he insisted that millions of people voted illegally, giving Hillary Clinton her popular-vote victory."

And other lines include this one about President Trump: "His boasting and tendency to believe conspiracy theories" and, during a different broadcast, that Trump had "another Twitter tantrum." He described Kellyanne Conway as "a fearless fabulist." 

But wait, it gets even better. Tom Bettag, a former executive producer of ABC's Nightline in the Ted Koppel years actually said these words, "He is not biased or grinding an ax, but certainly some of those lines have bite in them." 

That's the crux of the issue. If the executive producers mistake "bias" for mere "bite," there's no hope at all. Bettag went on to say, "Scott sees himself in the Murrow and Cronkite tradition, referring to journalistic icons Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.  

This prompted Instapundit to rename the article facetiously by writing, " News Anchor Quits Pretending Not To Be Lefty Tool, Embraces Full-On Tooldom." Then he observed, "Well, given that Cronkite was a lefty tool who pretended an avuncular neutrality before eventually pulling off the mask, I’d say he’s half-right, anyway."

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