Posted on 03/25/2019 6:50:08 PM PDT by lasereye
Yesterday it was all about the Mueller report and the Barr letter.
Today the news and commentary seems to be focusing more on the press itself: whether the MSM will ever own up to the magnitude of their mistake/lies (I very much doubt it). How much their coverage of Russiagate has damaged their reputation, and with whom. Whether they even recognize how much this has damaged their reputation. What their next move will be.
And on and on and on—for a few examples, see this, this, this, this, and above all this from Matt Taibbi, who is most definitely not on the right and not a Trump-supporter in any way. And the MSM tries gamely but ridiculously to defend itself here, here, and in what is perhaps my favorite headline of all: “Trump Is Bullying the Media Into Falsely Exonerating Him of Russia Corruption.”
You cannot make this stuff up. But the headline writers at New York Magazine apparently can, and it’s not in parody.
The question I want to try to answer right now is why did they do it? Why the nonstop incessant seemingly-interminable beating of the “Trump is guilty of collusion and there is evidence” drum? By “they” I mean the MSM, more than the Democrats, although the two work hand in hand of course. Why did the media stick their collective necks out on such shaky-to-nonexistent evidence, knowing how tenuous it was, and that the day of reckoning might indeed come?
I offer the following reasons, not mutually exclusive (although some are):
(1) They truly thought Mueller would find collusion, either because they really believed Trump colluded with Russia, or because they thought Mueller was partisan enough to find collusion where none existed.
(2) It was a kind of tulip mania, a contagion that spread throughout their ranks, a wishful thinking squared and then cubed.
(3) They didn’t think of the future at all. There was only the eternal-seeming present, in which this story fed their own Trump-hatred and drove ratings. Their audience craved it, and so did they.
(4) They figured that if the day of reckoning and Trump’s exoneration ever came, they could spin it to their advantage (or at least deflect it), as they had done so many times before with so many other stories.
(5) They thought Trump would make many many more missteps, and one of those missteps might intervene to cause his downfall independently of this. And meanwhile, they had a great and ongoing story to keep them going.
(6) They were gearing this to Congress, and thought that a combination of all the Democrats and a significant number of Republicans would believe the story and impeach Trump or even impeach and convict him, even before Mueller was finished.
(7) I actually think this last one is the most important: Watergate.
Watergate turns out to have been the worst thing that ever happened to the press in my lifetime, although they probably think it was the best and the high point. It gave them not just delusions of grandeur but an actual example of their power to bring down the mighty with their metaphorical pens instead of swords.
Watergate was many things, but one of them was a triumph for the press. The press hated Nixon prior to Watergate, and in Watergate several elements came together: an actual wrongdoing with actual evidence of it by the president, an FBI informant with his own agenda, a GOP willing to take the high road and convince its own president to resign or be thrown out, and a public unjaded by all that’s happened since.
The press also became heroes, not only in their own eyes but generally. A movie was made in which Woodward was played by Robert Redford in his handsome prime, and Bernstein was played by the less-comely but still very popular Dustin Hoffman. Who could ask for anything more?
Only a few of today’s journalists were around back then (except as little children), but you better believe that Watergate was not lost on them nor was it lost on their professors at journalism school or school in general. The narrative was so compelling that I’m virtually certain that one of the main things that drove them in Russiagate was the desire for a repeat. They believed they had the ingredients, or at least the most important ingredients to them: a Republican president they hated, informants in the FBI and elsewhere, tales of secret machinations by the administration, and Republicans in Congress who they thought could be rather easily persuaded to turn on that president.
The fact that Russiagate was actually the un-Watergate probably did not even cross their minds. This was the reverse Watergate, the Watergate in which the president was not the perp, and the instruments of intelligence and justice were weaponized against him rather than that he made a blocked attempt to enlist them against his enemies. In the un-Watergate the press, instead of being able to successfully cast itself as the bold uncoverer of the terrible truth about the president, has been revealed to have been mainly in the business of amplifying lies about the president.
That election event was worse than Watergate (I’m old enough to remember both) since Obama used the powers of the government to spy on American citizens.
They voted for HRC.
Besides being lowlifes? Well they wanted to pretend to be Woodward & Bernstein who btw are lowlifes.
That’s right; they all work for the same people - the “media” is the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, nothing less (and nothing more).
You are correct. Watergate was a Media coup.
The media destroyed a president they disliked, with a crisis they mostly created.
We have been living in a mediacracy since, though you could argue it really started when they destroyed McCarthy.
democrats still screaming about obstruction- Juliani shuts them down by saying something along the lines of “It’s impossible for there to be obstruction if there is no underlying crime”
Boom- No crime, no obstruction- period!
The lame stream media has no longer any serious journalism and has become the propaganda arm of the DNC. It was obvious during the Bush and Obama years when every network parroted the same DNC talking points. With Trump the press morphed into a 25/7 version of Orwell’s ”Two minute hate” where the talking heads give spittle spewing rants about Trump’s utter evil. Hillary’s minions created the Russia collusion narrative as part of an orchestrated effort to topple Trump and prop up Hillary after her humiliation at the pols. This narrative was manipulated by the DOJ and FBI into what can only be characterized as an attempted coup. Sedition was rampant all the way to the Obama White House. The media was wholly complicit in this attempted coup.
“I think a huge number of them believed it”
(Oh sure, and, Joseph Goebbels was actually a sincere, mistaken chap.)
“They were in on the conspiracy. They didn’t believe it because they helped to fabricate the lie.”
Amen, brother/sister.
Now, instead of aspiring to be agents of accuracy and truth, those in journalism want to ‘change the world’, and feel justified in spinning what they report and write in a manner that pushes their messianic agenda. Pathetically, it's all about ego. ;
I believe a few highly placed, elite, news editors drove this. The peon copy writers were sympathetic to it because of their journalism school indoctrination, but had no choice in what was actually published. They knew what to write to please their bosses, but couldn’t have written the truth without losing their jobs.
Why? Because much of big media is the propaganda/communications division for deep state. Like foreign countries they seek to destabilize, or overturn, they always go after the communications, Including right here in the United States.
IF any of the media those involved are essentially decent human beings, then they just have collectively suffered from Dan Rather disease. They believed it because they wanted it to be true, and ignored the proportional font of reality. The only that this could have been worse for them if it was printed at Kinkos.
And they wanted another Watergate without accepting that reality either. Nixon won 49 states in the 1972 election; if the Watergate break in had not happehed, Nixon would have won 49 states.
Another favor to hitlery/obama
Richard Jewel
Trial by media...
Remember how the press fawned over Michael Avenatti for months?
Out here in flyover we spotted his creepy type within minutes. He's a bad guy. Journalists didn't catch on to what he was until it was thrown in their little faces.
Didn't that strike you as weird at the time?
I think people in the press can't tell the difference between good people and bad people. Journalists usually can't do math either. And they're more emotional and easily fooled. It might have to do with extremely high verbal skills. Brain over-development in one area at the expense of other areas. People with math over-development also have their own sets of 'in common' traits.
I think people in the press can’t tell the difference between good people and bad people.
But they do try - I've known journalists and too many of them lack that deep understanding that allows a person to tell the difference between good people and bad people. It's weird.
Still stranger to see it on a large scale ... so many of them falling for a thug like Avenatti for so long. Or for a 'Beto' ... Beto's such a jerk. And they can't see it.
It's a mystery
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