RebKell's Junkie Boards

[jammerbirdi]

Author of the book, Insane Clown President, and many great pieces for Rolling Stone like Inside the Republican Clown Car this is what everyone should be reading while they're waiting for their own personal autographed copy of the Mueller Report. As I said in the MR thread last night, this is as important a piece of writing in a particular moment as anything ever. It goes way beyond Mueller.

Here are excerpts from a very long piece. Read to the end and see if you absorb the same stunning creepy takeaway from this piece as I did.

It's Official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD

The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it.

- Matt Taibbi

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia “contacts,” inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate piece by Peter Baker, the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:

"It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole…"

The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like itself made galactic errors by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele’s results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start.

For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele’s revelations, the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been there. Post reporters, Miller said, “literally spent weeks and months trying to run down” the Cohen story.

“We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there,” he said, “and came away empty.”

This was heads-I-win, tails-you-lose reporting. One assumes if Miller found Cohen’s name in a hotel ledger, it would have been on page 1 of the Post. The converse didn’t get a mention in Miller’s own paper. He only told the story during a discussion aired by C-SPAN about a new book he’d published. Only The Daily Caller and a few conservative blogs picked it up.

It was the same when Bob Woodward said, “I did not find [espionage or collusion]… Of course I looked for it, looked for it hard.”

The celebrated Watergate muckraker – who once said he’d succumbed to “groupthink” in the WMD episode and added, “I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder” – didn’t push very hard here, either. News that he’d tried and failed to find collusion didn’t get into his own paper. It only came out when Woodward was promoting his book Fear in a discussion with conservative host Hugh Hewitt.

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Every woman who has ever been presented with a career/sex quid pro quo in the entertainment industry should come forward and simply say, “Me, too.” - jammer The New York Times 10/10/17

[Luuuc]

Thanks for the excerpts. I've already read enough now to know that book is #FakeNews

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Thanks for calling. I wait all night for calls like these.

[jammerbirdi]

Glad you like it. Here’s more:

“The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New York Times on Feb 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting.

The Times ran this quote high up:

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.

The Times quoted a New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme:

We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet…

The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently said he was “not convinced” on the whole “bot thing.”

But when one of your top sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your article, you should at least take the quote out, or put an update online. No luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.

Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc.

With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially said the Russian traded sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to undermine democracy, a “real-life Red Sparrow,” as ABC put it.

But a judge threw out the sex charge after “five minutes” when it turned out to be based on a single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina’s car for inspection.

It’s pretty hard to undo public perception you’re a prostitute once it’s been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like “Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan” online in the New York Times.

Here a reporter might protest: how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn’t I believe them?

How about because, authorities have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It doesn’t take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving the media.”

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Every woman who has ever been presented with a career/sex quid pro quo in the entertainment industry should come forward and simply say, “Me, too.” - jammer The New York Times 10/10/17

[GlennMacGrady]

Bracket:

https://nypost.com/2019/03/25/mueller-madness-the-media-pundits-who-got-it-most-wrong/

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http://www.youtube.com/MagicBusBasketball

[tfan]

It might be OK for Trump supporters to spike the "Russian Collusion" football, but Congress is now going to move on to obstruction of justice. Firing Comey and then going on national TV and saying that he relieved a lot of pressure or something seems like it would be an easy case. But it is complicated by the fact that he is apparently absolved of the crime he would have been trying to cover up.

[GlennMacGrady]

Here's Glenn Greenwald explaining how he and other left wing journalists like Matt Taibi were banned from MSNBC because they wouldn't parrot the lies about the Russian collusion "scam", which was the network's scripted narrative to save itself from almost going out of business. He says the network's primetime hosts should hang their heads and apologize for three years of disinformation.

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Here's a column in The Hill, which does offer apologies for misleading readers for three years.

[tfan]

I don't know if MSNBC needed Russia Collusion to greatly boost their ratings, as Greenwald says. Just a Trump presidency was probably enough for that.

[pilight]

[tfan]

They were going down in the first half of the decade,



2019 was lower than in 2018 earlier in the year but this month Fox and MSNBC are up over 2018. MSNBC has gotten the biggest boost from Trump versus what the above graph shows for 2014:

March 12 reporting:
Prime Time All:
Fox News (2,324,000) +1% versus a year ago
MSNBC (1,986,000) +9% versus a year ago
CNN (not in top 10 - below 1,006,000) -16% versus a year ago

They all have very old audiences:
25-49 age demo prime time:
Fox News 371,000
MSNBC 341,000
CNN 242,000

[huskiemaniac]

And yet, all of the sudden Greenwald and Taibbi believe that what Attorney General Barr has written about the Mueller report represents the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. One can only assume that being on team DOJ is just fine.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/26/why-taibbi-and-greenwald-shouldnt-feel-vindicated/

[jammerbirdi]

Yeah so I've got a lot of problems with that piece. First, I'm surprised with the comprehensive undressing of the mainstream media that Taibbi accomplished in his article that there hasn't been more and better efforts to hit back from the big news. But I can tell you from personal experience, their very best tactic when they are exposed is to ghost the person who has exposed them. Years from now, they'll point to THIS person's piece in the bloody Washington Monthly and say, Yeah, Nancy LeTourneau took Taibbi's angle apart in the Washington [coughs into sleeve].

So that's for starters. Second, she mixes Greenwald and Taibbi up real nice together.

As late as February 2018, after Mueller released his indictments against dozens of Russians for their social media campaigns, Greenwald was still in denial. Here’s what Taibbi wrote about that this week

Here is what it all comes down to.