Why the MSM couldn’t resist the Manafort/Assange story
If you blinked, you might have missed it, but the left-wing rag known as the Guardian published a bombshell story yesterday about a secret meeting between Manafort and Assange, and then slowly and stealthily crept the story back.
Everyone fingered in the story denies it most vociferously. Assange is threatening to sue. The Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the meeting supposedly occurred, has no logs of it.
Otherwise, no problem.
And even the Guardian has now introduced hedge-y language into the story to establish plausible deniability.
But perhaps the writers and editors at the paper aren’t as negligent as they might seem. I used to ask the question “fool or knave?” when this sort of thing happened. But in recent years I’ve come to think that it’s not all that relevant, because it’s pretty obvious that the MSM is more than willing to publish many stories with knowledge of their sketchiness (or even their downright falsehood) because the price they pay for this is low and the rewards are high.
If reporters see themselves first and foremost as warriors in the fight against the evil right (and the evil Trump, of course), then all news is only as good as its propaganda value. True or false, if it reaches a large audience it affects that audience, even if the story is later shown to be false. The mental seed is planted, and for many many readers the correction never comes. Which is all to the good if journalists see their role as Speaking a Greater Truth than Truth Itself.
Those high-decibel threats to sue—by both Manafort and Assange—seem to have got the attention of the stealthy, dishonest “practitioners of journalism” at “The Guardian”:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/314242/
One might hope the threats are a rousing success.
(To be sure, the usual suspects will shriek that lies, slander and libel are protected by “freedom of the press”….especially when Trump and his pals are the targets!)
I thought the guy’s name was Assange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange
Sam L:
Oops, brain glitch, will fix.
I must have confused him with a massage.
Mission accomplished. Lots of people hear the original story, never hear the follow-up walkback or retraction. I’ve not yet asked, and likely won’t, but I’m willing to bet my leftist friends and family are convinced that the meeting took place.
A silver lining in the dark media cloud is the opportunity to move on from the “fool or knave” question and its various complexities to a simpler view. It is good to be aware of the media’s foolishness, knavery, and indifference to standards of professional journalism**. All of which points to a condition of advanced rot. I have used the MSM as a reverse barometer of whom to vote for and against since 2008. Whenever their political bias is blatantly obvious (as it frequently is), they make voting easy. I will continue voting against them until the bias disappears.
**Per the Wikipedia page on this topic, the media’s own standards require truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards
I’m willing to bet my leftist friends and family are convinced that the meeting took place.
67% of Democrats believe that the Russians “manipulated the votes” to make Trump president. This is the level of insanity that exists on the left. Nobody even alleged that or tried to show it was possible.
Mollie Hemingway takes the MSM apart on this:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/28/manafort-assange-drama-proves-media-will-buy-any-russia-conspiracy-story-no-matter-its-flaws/
If it fits their narrative, they’ll drink any kind of kool-aid.
I keep thinking that this steadily eroding credibility will result in people finally seeing the light and abandoning the MSM one-by-one. Then i catch myself and think if that were true, it would already have happened. That type of truth and justice seldom exists outside of comic books. What happens instead is that the standards of their audience keep dropping to fit what they are presented. We require news, and if we don’t have good sources – or refuse to believe good sources for other reasons – then we will have bad ones.
It’s not “just” cynicism if it leads one to the truth (about the media).
steve walsh on November 28, 2018 at 5:04 pm at 5:04 pm said:
Mission accomplished. Lots of people hear the original story, never hear the follow-up walkback or retraction. I’ve not yet asked, and likely won’t, but I’m willing to bet my leftist friends and family are convinced that the meeting took place.
* * *
Indeed. That’s why retractions and corrections are made by stealth, as late as possible, and sometimes not at all.
And then the busted story is re-introduced whenever it serves a political purpose. See: NYT and Sarah Palin in re “crosshairs” and political violence.
Being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry.
Also, see this:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/jerome-corsi-roger-stone-and-the-austin-powers-theory-of-russian-collusion/
“…Speaking a Greater Truth…”
AKA “…hiding the truth….” (or if you wish, “obfuscating the truth”, or “lying by omission”—gosh, all these choices!)
Key graph from:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/is_the_deep_state_feeling_the_heat.html
“Bad as it may have been, the worst of the Russia Hoax was not the abuse of the FISA electronic surveillance regime for political purposes. Nor is the worst even the patent involvement of our intelligence agencies — and in particular the FBI and CIA — in electoral politics. No, the worst aspect of the Russia Hoax is that our intelligence agencies, including elements of DoJ and the State Department cooperating with the Clinton campaign, enlisted the intelligence services of foreign powers — first in their effort to defeat the candidacy of Donald Trump and, when that effort failed, turning their efforts to what can only be described as an attempted coup against the elected President of the United States.”
File under: Most certainly NOT “All the news that’s fit to print”(!)
I keep thinking that this steadily eroding credibility will result in people finally seeing the light and abandoning the MSM one-by-one.
I hate to go full Godwin here but, with the US media, I keep thinking of why all those intelligent Germans went along with Hitler. Goebbels would be proud of CNN.
Another Mueller story, that seems to focus on Trump’s business before he was president.
The Times reports that “Cohen admitted to making false statements to Congress about his efforts to pursue a Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign.”
In January 2016, before he was the nominee, his associates were working on a project that undoubtedly preceded his announcement he was running.
“I keep thinking that this steadily eroding credibility will result in people finally seeing the light and abandoning the MSM one-by-one.”
People don’t give up their beliefs when they are lied to but instead they hold onto these beliefs even more firmly. This is a good book on the topic.
https://www.amazon.com/When-Prophecy-Fails-Leon-Festinger/dp/1578988527
MikeK,
“I hate to go full Godwin here but…”
As I understand it, Godwin’s law is as follows:
=====
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
=====
It seems to me that this is trivially true. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving architecture/ballet/Cesium, etc. also approaches 1. If any of the preceding haven’t been referenced, well then, the discussion simply hasn’t gone on long enough.
In other words, I really don’t understand the deference to Godwin’s law.
Sonny Wayze:
Yes, Godwin’s Law isn’t saying much on the face of it. But the unspoken premise behind the law is that the probability that the topic of Nazis will come up in any online discussion is higher than the probability of any other single subject coming up.
Or something like that.
Neo – Godwin picked on “Nazi comments” for exactly the reason that we have seen the Left deploy that epithet for the Right where it clearly does not apply.
Once a comment thread hits the point where accusations of “Nazi!” appear, then all reasonable discussion has ceased.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/03/godwins-law-mike-godwin-hitler-nazi-comparisons.html
That point is getting sooner and sooner, and in some cases, reaches into the original posts themselves.
Wikipedia: Godwin’s law does not claim to articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate hyperbolic comparisons. “Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics,” Godwin wrote, “its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust.”[12]
FWIW, Godwin now asserts that it may be perfectly approriate to refer to Trump and his supporters as Nazis (and certainly to the Charlottesville neo-Nazis (duh) — but not to Antifa, apparently), and his law does not apply to those “discussions.”
(links at Wiki).