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by leereeves
1787 days ago
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They uncritically accepted these claims, without sufficient investigation, because they wanted them to be true. Worse, the attitude seems to be "so what if they're partisan", as you said. Neither they nor their audience have learned anything from their many mistakes. And that's being generous by allowing that they were mistakes. One would expect mistakes to happen in both directions, but as Glenn Greenwald said of the media in general, "The most notable aspect is that they all go toward promoting the same narrative."[1] I suspect what's really happening here is that the standards for publication are drastically, catastrophically lower when the story is both powerful and politically convenient. That is not a mistake; that is prioritizing politics over truth. That is a publication that's in the business of propaganda, not journalism. 1: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w... |
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That doesn't match my recollection. For instance, I recall the reporting I read about the Steele dossier reported that it existed and made claims X, Y, Z, but it did not endorse those claims. And that's not just me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier:
> The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations...
On the Lafayette square thing, I don't recall how tentative the exact language the stories used was (and I certainly didn't read every one), but the the timeline of the events makes it very clear that crowd clearance and the photo op were closely coordinated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J.... Which does back to my last point: it looked like a duck, it quacked like a duck, they reported it was a duck, but after a year of investigation and a battery of DNA tests, it turned out it was a mutant goose.
I wouldn't draw too strong conclusions from Greenwald's list. And frankly if those things are embarrassing he should be embarrassed too, because the "Havana Syndrome" story (#6) isn't over, yet he jumped the shark to claim it's been debunked. He honestly seems to be cherrypicking to support his narrative, which is one of those things you have to correct for.