Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.
Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They
viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that
bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually
had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (
invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (
untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (
no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were
disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.
As Greenwald
noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (
also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were
not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.
More recently, the MSM were telling us for months that inflation is a phantasm. We were
told that the “2021 Inflation Scare is another in a series of false alarms going back several decades.” We were
assured that “the numbers at least for now are on the side of those expecting the trend to subside and then stabilize at lower levels.” Any concern was “
fearmongering politics.” And now we wake up to the highest inflation in 30 years, counter-balancing wage increases. Still, they tell us, all will be well.
Remember when we were told the burgeoning border crisis was just “seasonal variation?” That was a claim
trotted out in the
Washington Post which the President himself quickly repeated. It
wasn’t true, but most of the media never really leaned into the border story. Last fiscal year was the highest number of encounters at the southern border
ever recorded and you barely hear about it in the news. Unless some member of the border patrol can be accused of
whipping migrants (which didn’t happen) it’s usually on the back burner.
There’s also the issue of Critical Race Theory in schools, which the entire national media has decided is a lie despite the fact that there’s plenty of evidence CRT has taken over many college campuses and has a foothold in private schools. It’s already a part of public school teacher training and is working its way into curriculums in California, in Loudoun County, Virginia and elsewhere.
There are other examples of this, significant ones, that Sullivan doesn’t mention. Remember last year when Andrew Cuomo was made the hero of the pandemic by an adoring media (especially CNN which had him do interviews with his own brother)? It turns out he wasn’t a hero and one dumb decision involving nursing homes probably led to hundreds of
additional deaths, deaths that he then
tried to cover up.
greenwald.substack.com
hotair.com
freebeacon.com
