Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Suggesting that there's something special about the media and this subject seems like a strong example of the Chinese robber fallacy. |
There are grounds to suggest that fallacy applies, but they fade away if you consider the way Russiagate and WMD (to use Taibbi's comparison) were hijacked and driven in a particular direction by the media.
In the run-up to Iraq, the quantum of evidence suggesting Hussein did not have WMD continued to grow. There was a race on the part of neocons in the Administration to get the war started before the emerging evidence reached a tipping point and toppled the effort to start the war. At each turn, the most powerful voices in the mainstream media engaged in willful ignorance. A cynic would argue, and many have, the media wanted a war.
In Russiagate, as Taibbi details, the biggest mainstream media outlets (save Fox, which is a Trump propaganda machine) pushed forth the narrative that there must have been collusion. Every time a story about Russiagate suggested to prove collusion was later found to be either embellished or false (Taibbi notes something like 50 instances of this), the media responded by either:
1. Burying that finding; or,
2. Putting out a new salacious story linking Trump to Russia to cover up the fact that a previous story was found to be false.
All efforts were directed toward one aim: Retaining at all costs the appearance that Mueller was sitting on bombshells, and Trump was not only guilty, but guilty as hell, of collusion.
Only in very limited instances did large media outlets admit and apologize for having published false "proof" of collusion.
If you happened across almost any news source other than Fox (which was busy running a counter narrative just as dishonest), you were also fed "evidence" of dubious quality like the Steele Dossier as though it were reputable. As Taibbi notes, when that evidence was correctly assessed as flawed, the media didn't pivot to an analysis of whether it was or was not flawed. Most mainstream outlets instead advocated for the position the Steele Dossier was credible. They put on lawyers' hats and made arguments rehabilitating it.
Taibbi lays this out much better than I am here. But he wasn't the only one doing this. Glenn Greenwald, a Trump hater, started questioning Russiagate very early in the process. This garnered him considerable criticism from his colleagues. Why? Because people doing what Taibbi and Greenwald did, something called journalism, violate the New Rules of our modern media.
We are on the side of good, and so we are licensed to be wrong here and there. It's all for a laudable aim.*
The sneaky reaction to Taibbi's piece has been, "What else should the media have done? We needed to investigate Trump!" That sleight of hand ducks the criticism. The problem wasn't in investigating Trump. That was more than warranted. The problem was in convicting him before Mueller was finished with his investigation. That didn't work out so well, and the media should have suspected it wouldn't have worked out so well given a lot of evidence it presented along the way was of questionable veracity.**
The bigger media outlets offered grudging
mea culpas many years after the Iraq War turned out to be a disaster. They admitted that they ran with a false narrative that there was solid evidence of WMD despite considerable evidence to the contrary. I don't think Trump deserves any
mea culpa from anyone in the media or otherwise. He certainly acted guilty enough (if I thought him smart, I might think his doing so was the mother of all rope-a-dopes on a credulous media). But the media should (and will of course not) learn this lesson: It is not in the business of crafting the political reality it desires, but reporting on the facts in front of it. To engage in the not-too-far-from-Pravda narrative creation the majority of the media was guilty of in 2003, and now again in Russiagate, while excoriating Russia, provides some very dark comedy.
Does this apply to all of the media? No. Just most, and almost all large media outlets. Which gets me out of the Chinese Robbers box.
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* I hear this refrain from the right wing as well. Question a crazy old relative on why he sends out false emails filled with conspiracy nonsense about Democrats or believes crap he hears on Fox and many will admit, "I'm fine with disinformation that brings people to my side and hurts the other side. We need to save this country."
** The politicians who bought into the narrative and proclaimed collusion a foregone conclusion made a grievous tactical error. Pelosi, on the other hand, looks like a sage. AOC is also playing this very well, btw:
https://www.gq.com/story/ocasio-cortez-mueller-report
