Recently in this space I wrote about the common misuse of the word “scandal” (see “Look to the Media for Greatest Scandal of Our Lifetime”). Too often people use the word to mean not something that is a scandal but something they think ought to be a scandal. The whole point about the “scandals” of Hunter Biden before the election or Eric Swalwell after it is that they weren’t scandals—though they should have been. As oxygen is necessary for fire, so is publicity necessary for scandal, and both these scandals have been practically snuffed out, as scandals, by the media’s denying them the oxygen of publicity. But this use, or misuse, of words is a much more general phenomenon than most people realize. In the media it is virtually epidemic. Routinely, things are stated as facts—for instance, that President Trump “lies” about election fraud—that cannot possibly be known as facts. …