excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 18,353
- 34,880
- 2,290
From a real journalist. A long and a most worthy read of an article.
...
That is the critical context for the lie spread yesterday by numerous mainstream journalists. On Tuesday morning, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified a short 12-page report entitled “Foreign Threats to the U.S. 2020 Elections.”
It reviewed the actions of numerous countries with regard to the 2020 election. The intelligence community claimed — without presenting any evidence whatsoever — that “Russian President Putin authorized…influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.” The New York Times’ largely credulous article about this report contained this admission, one you would think (or, rather, hope) would matter to journalists: “The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election.”
Despite that glaring omission, media outlets predictably treated the evidence-free assertions from the security state as fact. “Vladimir Putin did it again,” trumpeted Mother Jones’ David Corn without an iota of skepticism. CNN’s Marshall Cohen actually said this:
Think about that: to a CNN reporter, evidence-free assertions from the U.S. security state are tantamount to “confirmation.” That they really do think this way is nothing short of chilling. But that is the standard liberal media posture of harboring reverence for the U.S. intelligence community and treating its every utterance as Truth without the need for any corroborating evidence. It is one of their defining attributes.
But in this case, many of them went far beyond mere regurgitation of CIA claims. Well beyond it: here, they fabricated a claim that report also demonstrated that the Hunter Biden laptop materials were — as they claimed before the election — engineered by Russia. In reality, the report did not even mention the Hunter Biden laptop materials or allude to it, let alone claim that it was produced by the Kremlin, let alone supply evidence that it constituted “Russian disinformation.” But no matter: numerous journalists united to spread the false claim far and wide that the report confirmed this storyline.
...
Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Yesterday Spread a Significant Lie All Over Twitter
Eager to obtain vindication for the pre-election falsehood they spread about the Hunter Biden story, journalists falsely claim that the CIA blamed Russia for it.
greenwald.substack.com