I found this piece on Memeorandum, and didn't pay attention to the writer until I was about 1/3rd of the way through. Matt Taibbi is a liberal politics writer for Rolling Stone magazine. He gained my respect for taking on the 9-11 Truthers and here he takes on the MSM for their overly credulous reporting on RussiaGate. Keep in mind that Taibbi is far from a Trump sychophant; his book on the 2016 Election is entitled The Insane Clown President. But here he hits on the media, which he points out made lots and lots of errors in their reporting on the issue and oddly enough in one direction:
Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.
And he even suggests it may have gone beyond simple confirmation bias:
Taibbi provides a stunning number of recent examples of notable journalists like Bob Woodward recently renouncing their own reporting on major elements of RG, but (drumroll please) not in the original article online, but in his newest book:
Note that bit about WMD; Taibbi's also been a relentless critic of the MSM's acceptance of the WMD claims in the run-up to the Iraq War. Solid read and a stunning liberal criticism of the media's overly credulous coverage of the Trump-Russia connection for the last several years.
Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.
And he even suggests it may have gone beyond simple confirmation bias:
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Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition. |
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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. |
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2YkqGPi
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