When the Leftstream media (the word “Mainstream” becoming obsolete) speaks or writes, your
first impression always be, “It’s a lie.”
Leftist Net-rag BuzzFeed put the last
nail in the coffin of credibility with the “Trump suborned perjury and should
be impeached” lie.
That’s my two-cents.
JRH 1/20/19
Your generosity is always appreciated:
********************
Another Media Bombshell Turns Out To Be A Dud
By Derek Hunter
Jan 20, 2019 12:01 AM
Journalism is dead. It wasn’t murder, or old age, it was
suicide. Journalism died after drinking a cocktail of contempt, arrogance,
ignorance, and enough narrative to kill a whale. Its corpse rolls on, meeting
deadlines, publishing stories, and forming cable news panels continuing to
extol the virtues of the poisons that killed it. They deserve your skepticism
and your contempt.
The latest nail in the media’s credibility coffin landed
Friday night. It was a bombshell story that declared, “President Donald
Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about
negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law
enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.”
Subornation of perjury is a serious allegation for a “news”
organization to make. At least it has become one in the years since Bill
Clinton actually did it with Monica Lewinsky and Democrats didn’t care (it’s
amazing what a difference party membership makes). If true, talking heads
exclaimed, this would be grounds for impeachment of the President.
A second after Buzzfeed, the glorified blog known mostly for
clickbait listicles and cat videos, published the allegations all presses were
stopped. Newspapers and networks sent their reporters on a quest to verify the
story, based on anonymous sources, for themselves. They couldn’t.
Normally, if journalism were still a profession with
standards, this “bombshell” wouldn’t warrant more than a mention unless and
until it was able to be corroborated by someone, even an anonymous someone, by
the other organizations. You can’t report on someone else’s anonymous reporting
if you can’t get anyone to back it up. But these aren’t normal times.
Every outlet ran the story, adding a casual mention of not
having (yet) been able to “independently verify” it for themselves. A mere
formality; it had to be true, after all, it was a story about Donald Trump,
painting him as a criminal – the top item on Christmas lists in newsrooms from
coast to coast.
All of Friday was consumed by this story and its
implications.
Meanwhile, no one was able to verify any of it.
The two reporters who “broke” the story were immediately
booked on cable news to be celebrated as conquering heroes. And they immediately contradicted each other on
the crucial question of whether or not they’d actually seen documents proving
their story with their own eyes.
When CNN asked if he’d seen the proof himself, one reporter
named Anthony Cormier said, “No, I have not seen it personally. But the folks
we have talked to -- two officials we have spoken to, are fully 100% read it,
to that aspect of the special counsel’s investigation.”
The other reporters, named Jason Leopold, was asked on MSNBC
about his partner’s admission and responded, “Over the course of a year we've reported
pretty extensively on the Trump Moscow project, and we have been -- I'll just
say that we've seen documents, we’ve been briefed on documents. We're very
confident in our reporting.”
One said they hadn’t seen any proof themselves, the other
said they did. It can’t be both.
No one took a knee when those flags were raised, they all
saluted and continued an endless series of hypothetical discussions predicated
on a story no one at any news organization could back up. I’d be shocked if
several of the participants didn’t win Pulitzer Prizes.
Journalism went to Hell courtesy of what its practitioners
view as its shining moment – Watergate – and it hasn’t looked back since.
As I wrote in my book, “Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein made an untold fortune, were played in a movie by
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, were showered with awards, and sent many
journalists running down the path of fame rather than truth. And fame is the
only thing heroin gets addicted to. The thing was, Woodward and Bernstein were
real journalists. They reported a real story of corruption, worked sources,
uncovered information, checked their facts, and got the story right. In other
words, they earned their accolades. Today, too many journalists aren’t
interested in doing the work, they just want the rewards.”
And there is a lifetime of rewards awaiting whoever claims
the scalp under the golden coiffed locks resting atop Donald Trump’s head. Its
pursuit has perverted the profession more than anything before it, and this
time they thought they had it.
Late in the evening on Friday, in an extremely rare move,
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office broke their long-standing silence to
issue a statement on the story, a strong statement of denial. “BuzzFeed's
description of specific statements to the Special Counsel's Office, and
characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding
Michael Cohen's Congressional testimony are not accurate,” the statement read.
Mueller could have remained silent, could have let the story
peter out the way so many others have, but he didn’t. He drove a stake through
its heart, rendering the entire day’s news cycle yet another fake news fever
dream.
How this whole Mueller investigation ultimately plays out is
anyone’s guess, anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. But how it’s
played out for the media is laid bare for the whole world to see. CNN’s Chris
Cuomo put it perfectly when he said, “Mueller didn’t
do the media any favors tonight, and he did do the president one, because…this
allows them to say, ‘You can’t believe it. You can’t believe what you read, you
can’t believe what you hear.”
No, Mueller didn’t do the media any favors; it’s not his job
to take the media’s side. It’s not the job of the media to have a side, or
course. If journalists worry so much about their reputation, maybe they should
try to remember that because the rest of us sure will.
Please subscribe to Derek’s daily podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, or Stitcher (it’s free and
you’ll like it!) to keep up to date on everything in the news,
politics, and in-depth analysis of media bias and corruption. Plus, it has
a lot of laughs.
________________
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