Opinion
There are few wider gulfs ‘twixt self-regard and reality than exist in the minds of mainstream media journalists. In their own minds, they’re still running All the President’s Men and Network on loop, imagining themselves as the lone, brave heroes “speaking truth to power”. To the rest of us, they’re a joke at best, an Anchorman riff on the risible notion of people believing “everything they see on television”.
At worst, they’re willing shills of an insidious Establishment: speaking lies for power.
Which explains the endless, dumb incomprehension whenever journalists covering public events find themselves hectored and abused. But, why? they wail.
Let us count the ways.
Was it in 2004, when Dan Rather went public with accusations and forged documents asserting George W. Bush dodged service in Vietnam? The hoax was exposed within hours, but Rather to this day and against all evidence continues to insist they were real. Aiding and abetting a fraud, Hollywood weighed in as well with a flick, Truth, starring Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett, that had the chutzpah to depict Rather and Mary Mapes, his producer, as noble victims of wicked right-wingers.
But back in 2004, the MSM were only getting started on the hyper-partisanship. They really lost their minds in 2016.
Or was it with Russiagate, which began 12 years later, when a dirt dossier filled with the most fanciful scenarios was shopped about Washington and relayed to the world. The right of reply was still there, but only as a pantomime charade whose real purpose was to repeat the allegations. ‘Mr Trump denies paying Moscow prostitutes to urinate on his pillow ‘ — that sort of thing, but the courtesy was only token. The weight of mainstream reporting tilted for four years to amplifying lies, leaks and smears with only the most perfunctory consideration of a Russiagate provenance that led directly back to Hillary Clinton’s lawyers and dirty trick dark operatives. Shameful as it was, none of this ruffled the media’s professional standards. Indeed, the NYT and WashPo bagged swags of Pulitzers for their Russiagate scoops, none of which was even remotely true.
But then, the NYT won a Pulitzer back in the 30s, when Walter Duranty knowingly lied through his teeth about mass famine in the Soviet Union.
Despite being caught out in their lies, even though they know we know that they’re lying, the MSM are still trying it on.
This week, though, came the worst and most spirited abuse of the old standards with a massive media deception whose flagrant and obviously bogus allegations were taken up and rebroadcast far and wide, even popping on our very own ABC, where two very different analyses were published, the second amusingly refuting the first.
It all began when Donald Trump told an audience of auto workers in Michigan that the Biden administration’s green mania for electric cars would be a disaster for Detroit.
It would, Trump said, be a bloodbath for the US industry. That was all the media needed. Within seconds, they were flooding their social media feeds with the lie that Trump had ordered his “MAGA Cult” followers to go on a violent rampage if he lost the election. It was the biggest MSM lie since they lied that he had praised white supremacists as “very fine people”, or told Americans to “inject bleach”.
By the next morning Radio National had dug up Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, whom it completely neglected to inform its listeners is an ardent Democratic activist and frequent financial supporter, to gibber about “fascism” and all the rest of the things leftist media regularly shout at us.
Stanley then proceeded to recite pretty much every talking point issued the night before by the Democratic National Committee‘s war room.
What makes Radio National’s hatchet job so laughable, quite apart from seeking analysis only from , a fact RN also neglected to mention, is that, two days later, Planet America refuted the ABC story by actually telling the truth, a rare thing at Their ABC. Trump wasn’t promising bloodshed on an industrial scale or anything like it, the hosts agreed, while diplomatically skipping any reference to the ABC’s Trump-promises-bloodshed beatup(s).
It’s all par for the course at Their ABC, which has yet to even acknowledge, let alone apologise and retract, the absurd and knowingly false three-part Four Corners “investigation” which spouted every talking point of the comprehensively debunked “Russian collusion” narrative.
But it’s not only Trump the ABC lies through its teeth about. This is what they told their remaining listeners about North Carolina lieutenant governor and Republican nominee for that state’s gubernatorial race, Mark Robinson:
an extremist who has described LGBTQI people as “filth”, referred to feminists as ‘Fem-Nazis’ and suggested that the Holocaust was “hogwash”.
It should surprise no one that not a word of this is even remotely true. Here’s what he said:
Let me be clear: I will fight for and protect the rights of all citizens, including those in the LGBTQ community to express themselves however they want. That is their right as Americans, and I don’t think the government has any role in telling them otherwise.
However, the idea that our children should be taught about concepts of transgenderism and be exposed to sexually explicit materials in the classrooms is abhorrent.
As for the alleged Holocaust denial, Robinson was warning pro-Second Amendment activists not to misappropriate the Holocaust with fake claims about Nazi gun confiscation.
The center and leftist leaning Weimar Republic put heavy gun ownership restrictions on German citizens long before the Nazis took power. This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash. Repeating that hogwash makes the conservative argument against the current attempts by liberal Marxist to push unconstitutional gun control measures in this nation look FOOLISH.
Quadrant Online
And the media wonder why people hate them.