For some 20 years George Stephanopoulos had us fooled. Well, not me and a few other cynics. We were on to him from the start.

But for 10 to 20 million Americans who got their news straight (or crooked) from ABC-TV day or night, Stephanopoulos was as good as his word.

Turns out that since 1996 he was always working for the other side, or for one particular side, the Democrats.

The Clintons, to be exact.

Had he been stealthily working for the Republicans, it would have been just as wrong.

For years he’d been a paid gopher for Bill and Hillary. The honchos at ABC knew a good thing when they saw one and anointed him to eventually chair the top spot in their news division. That he was actually a plant for Bill and Hillary – so what? Isn’t everybody?

Isn’t everybody in the news racket a registered Democrat? That’s perfectly all right so long as you quit campaigning.

Last week Stephanopoulos got caught. He was forced to come out of the shadows and admit that while he was covering politics, he was also covering the Clinton Foundation with gifts amounting to $75,000, which means that he could hardly be trusted as a neutral observer.

In other words, he could hardly be counted on to fulfill the task of a journalist. For all that time, not just last week, he was a fraud.

But he does have tradition to fall back on, namely the departed Peter Jennings.

Jennings set the tone, at least at ABC, for advocacy journalism, meaning leftist, meaning anti-American, totally anti-Israel news reporting. Jennings was always in the tank for Yasser Arafat and the PLO and in bed with Hanan Ashrawi – politically speaking, of course.

BDS brats and campus hooligans are the children of his slanted coverage, after you include Bob Simon, Tony Auth and Tom Friedman.

Now we learn, from the New York Post, that right before he got caught, Stephanopoulos signed up with ABC for $105 million over the next seven years. Wow! That makes him the wealthiest anchorman in the business pound for pound and proves what we always suspected, that in broadcasting faulty news to a gullible public you can never be too rich or too deceitful.

Where was I and where were you while this gold rush was going on at the networks?

But let’s not pick on ABC. A few months ago the anchor was Brian Williams and the place was NBC.

Williams was dumped because he was caught making up stories, tilting at windmills. Notice a trend?

Because a few years ago it was Dan Rather. The place was CBS. Rather was nabbed faking stories about George W. Bush – and who knew what else?

That’s the point. What else have they been lying about across the Big Three Networks?

How many generations have grown up duped and deceived into believing, for example, that cops are guilty and rioters are justified?

How many of us have been brainwashed into choosing the wrong side in the Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict?

“How can there be a ‘cycle of violence’ when only one side does all the suicide bombing?” asks Jay Garfield in this eye-opening book.

Journalists – we are summoned to be doctors of truth and to do no harm.

So it should be integrity that does the talking, not the money.

Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. The new thriller from the New York-based novelist, The Bathsheba Deadline, a heroic editor’s singlehanded war on terror and against media bias. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com