A unique four-part series by the progressive magazine, The Columbia Journalism Review argues that Americans have lost faith in the Mainstream Media, outlets such as the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSBNBC, and this fallout is largely due to the one-sided media coverage since 2016–the lies and narratives that falsely claimed that President Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, sometimes referred to as a Russiagate.
“Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive,” notes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeff Gerth. “Today, the US media has the lowest credibility — 26 percent — among forty-six nations.”
After the 2016 presidential election, writes Gerth, “the Times produced a steady stream of stories about whether Trump conspired with Russians to win the election without knowing whether the allegation was actually true…. Paul Krugman, in his Times column called Trump the ‘Siberian candidate,’ citing the [alleged] ‘watering down’ of the [GOP] platform [by Trump to make it less anti-Russia]. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a ‘de facto agent’ of Putin.”
But the whole of the news media got the story wrong. The outliers were independents such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
Glenn Greenwald famously left the Intercept, which he co-founded after his own editors tried to distort his reporting around Hunter Biden’s laptop. “It was a career-changing moment for me,” Matt Taibbi told Gerth. The “more neutral approach” to reporting “went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative — the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.”
Many mainstream news reporters, as well as anti-Trump members of Congress, accused Taibbi and Greenwald of being wrong about Russiagate, and also that they were working for the Russian government. This was odd given that they were widely known as Leftists and critics of U.S. government military and intelligence secrecy through both their journalism and commentary. Greenwald won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for his heavily-publicized reporting for The Guardian that the U.S. government was spying on Americans based on files stolen by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, about whom an Oscar-winning documentary was made.
Despite the fact that the whole Russiagate thing has been debunked, and is largely a false narrative pushed by the MSM, as well as Democrats in Congress (see Adam Schiff), polling shows that 48% of Americans and 84% of Democrats still believed after it was published that Trump or his campaign “worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election.”
According to the series, Russiagate is just one of many issues where the news media has been overwhelmingly one-sided. Climate change, people allowing adolescents diagnosed with psychiatric disorders to take puberty-blocking drugs and undergo surgeries to alter their genders, widespread media bias in terms of overcovering police killings of unarmed African Americans (31 last year) and underreporting of black lives lost to violent street crime (~8,000) are all aspects of the same problem.
The media are all in lockstep, all pushing the prescribed narrative.
For us older folks who lived through the VEET NAM times and remember the Korean conflict (which sadly might be only me and a handful of others who can remember things that occurred more than two or three minutes ago), we, or at least I, am well aware that the press is a liar used by the government (Truman and the NYT at the start of the Korean conflict, for example) to spread its lies about how the wars are going.
And as a citizen who does not like getting lied to (I confess that I am a Viet Nam veteran because I was stupid enough to get sucked in by LBJ’s lies in the media) I am glad that we have the Cape Charles Mirror as a Grand Palladium of Liberty where we can debunk the lies with facts and call the MSM and legacy media out as the liars and purveyors of falsehoods that they are – KEEP REPEATING THE LIES AND PEOPLE COME TO ACCEPT THEM AS TRUTH, but for the CCM!