Please disable your Ad Blocker to better interact with this website.

Journalists, (real journalists mind you – not the political activists who call themselves ‘reporters’) come in all political stripes and colors. Some are on the left (most, really), some are in the middle, and a few are on the right.

But one thing they can all agree on is that the mainstream media’s coverage of the “Russia Collusion Hoax” has been deplorable and unserious.

From the Center, the longtime CBS journalist Lara Logan is ashamed of her colleagues:

“I’ve been a journalist for more than three decades and I have to say that I feel ashamed when I was listening to those clips that you are playing, it made me feel ashamed, this is a terrible moment for us as journalists and I’ve been saying for several years now that accountability begins with us.

People across this country ask me all the time about fake news and how we got to this point where there’s so little trust in the media. And you see it. It’s playing right in front of you, right here. And I’ll give you one of — one of the most frustrating examples for me from the beginning is, do you remember when everyone was making fun of the president for saying he was wiretapped during the campaign, that the Trump Tower was being wiretapped? And we got lost in a conversation about semantics, and he was lampooned by the media. But later it emerged that the president’s campaign and Trump Tower were being surveilled by the intelligence agencies, which is obvious that’s exactly what he meant. And no one stood up then and said, the president was right. The intelligence agencies were listening to his campaign.

So it didn’t surprise me that journalists weren’t ready to stand up and say we were wrong and the president was right, that is not surprising. But it doesn’t make it any better. It’s not a fine moment for journalists, and journalism is all I’ve done all my life…

Go me, Laura, as a journalist, I think you are being kind when you say it’s a lack of curiosity because curiosity is the more fundamental quality for any real journalist. We are all nosy, right? So to me any time reporters are not being nosy, that’s willful. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the first thing you have got to ask about the BuzzFeed dossier, all the things we know about this dossier now, for example, that one candidate in their presidential election paid millions of dollars to American citizens to travel to Russia and meet with serving agents of Putin’s FSB, his intelligence services, who gave them information, misinformation as it turns out, about the opposition candidate in the election, which was fed to the intelligence agencies, it was fed to the Department of Justice, and it was fed to the media. And of course, it was then leaked.

And this was used by the courts and the intelligence agencies to use the power of our intelligence agencies against American citizens. This is a power that is meant to be used to protect this country against foreign enemies, not against its own citizens. That’s actually a crime when that power is misused. And no one has been held accountable for that. And that’s why Mike Flynn was the first casualty of this, because he was the man who was going to expose it.”

From the Left, here’s Glenn Greenwald mocking CNN and MSNBC for being the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party:

It wasn’t just Howard Dean, it was continuously on MSNBC which, let me just say, should have their top posts on primetime, go before the cameras and hang their head in shame, and apologize for lying to people for three straight years exploiting their fears to great profit. These are people who are on the verge of losing their jobs. That whole network was about to collapse, this whole scam saved them.

And not only did they constantly feed people for three straight years, total disinformation, they did it on purpose, Tucker. And the proof of that is that unlike you, who has been criticized and a lot of different ways by the left, some of which I agree with, and we talked about before, the first time I ever watched your show, you had on Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat to talk about on your set for 12 straight minutes collusion so that your audience could hear the other side of the story.

MSNBC did the exact opposite. There was a whole slew not just me of left wing journalist with very high journalistic credentials far more than anyone on that network like Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill and many others, including myself who were banned from the network because they wanted their audience not to know that anybody was questioning or expressing skepticism about the lies and the scam they were selling because it was so profitable. They did it on purpose.

It was a total fraud that they perpetrated on their audience. And to the extent that they talked about this at all, it was to call us agents of the Russian government to defame us as traders and to lie about us continuously to their audience. And there is still no accountability. They still won’t put us on their airwaves. They still won’t apologize and they’re still lying to their audience. They don’t want their audience to know what they did to them for three straight years on purpose…

It is completely corrupted journalism. The whole point of what we were supposed to learn from the debacle of WMDs and the Iraq War, which by the way, this network that we’re on was one of the leaders of, was the fact that we were not supposed to trust intelligence agencies, when they say things without evidence.

And not only did MSNBC and CNN use those people as their sources, they hired them as their news analyst. So if you turn on CNN or MSNBC, it was basically state TV. It was CIA TV. Three weeks ago, Tucker, three weeks ago, John Brennan was on MSNBC, and he said that he strongly believes that Robert Miller is going to indict members of the Trump family, either before or after March 15 because he’s too noble to use the Ides of March for having conspired with Russia.

They kept all dissent off the air. They turned themselves only into the spokes people of the people they are supposed to be investigating and scrutinizing which is the intelligence community and the military officials, who now are their colleagues, who now report the news. You have government officials who spent their whole careers in the Pentagon and in the CIA, they are disinformation agents, who now work at CNN and MSNBC, shaping what their news is. And that’s why these channels turned into disinformation campaigns, because those are the people that they hire, the people they’re supposed to be serving as watchdogs over the people who are neo-cons, the people who glide the country into war through WDMs, not only did they have no accountability, they got rewarded by becoming the stewards of these networks, and they lie to millions of people for three straight years and huge amounts of accountability is needed…

I mean, in one way, they can’t have accountability because Rachel Maddow who gets $10 million a year. She’s a huge corporate brand and she’s a big celebrity among liberals. So they’re going to keep her on the air. But I think that that they went so far overboard in deceiving and lying to people for so long.

I watched Ken Delaney and the NBC reporter who is basically the CIA spokesman on Twitter say, “Look, this is the end of the game Trump won. There’s no collusion,” and huge numbers of people on Twitter that follow NBC were genuinely confused. They were saying, “Wait a minute, you were telling us for three years all of this was a given that it was a slam dunk that it was just a matter of time when it would happen.” I think they’ve completely lost credibility and faith, even among their own followers who are now confused and disoriented. And they deserve all the scorn and all the loss of faith and credibility that they’re going to get. They are the reason why people don’t trust journalism.

The magnificent Sean Davis (whose work can be found at the Federalist) argues, from the right, that the media has done irreparable damage to their reputation with their slanted and inane ‘reporting’.

And the President agrees:

Here’s Davis:

Tucker Carlson: How big was your conclusion with the magnitude of the screw-up here?

Sean Davis: This is probably the biggest, most consequential screwup of the last 25 to 50 years. It is difficult to really comprehend or overstate the damage that the media did to the country, to their own reputation, to the constitution. This was an absolute catastrophe.

Tucker Carlson: I know liberals would feel that way. But I don’t know anybody running a media organization on the left who is willing to admit it. Just today there was a piece in which Dean Baquet of “The New York Times” and the editor of “The Washington Post” and Jeff Zucker of CNN, all bragging about what a great job they did. How could they say that?

Sean Davis: Why wouldn’t say? They were given Pulitzers. They were showered with adulation by their peers and able to pat each other on the back and tell them that they were heroes. That they’re going to bring down the next president and hold him accountable. There is no incentive in the media for them to have gotten this right. All the incentives in the wrong direction, whether it was traffic or viewership or ideology. There was no reason for them to get this right.

Tucker Carlson: The Mueller report summary comes out Sunday afternoon and the next day shows on CNN and MSNBC drop by as much as 50% in viewership, just on the news. Doesn’t that tell you everything about their incentive to pretend that there is collusion? Their audience goes away without it.

Sean Davis: Absolutely. And we saw the reaction, was like children finding out the tooth fairy isn’t real. Their bread and butter in the age of trump is to ratchet up the hysteria to get people completely freaked out so they feel they have to watch the news every day and every minute to figure out what is going on. They did a huge disservice to their country with their antics and their conspiracy spreading over the past two years.

Tucker Carlson: It is hard to know what comes next in this environment. I mean, when the smoke clears and Trump is gone or whatever happens in the next ten years, where do you go for news? Will anyone ever believe CNN, assuming it still exists, or “The Washington Post” or “The New York Times” ever again? How could you?

Sean Davis: Right, that is their problem. They didn’t just destroy their own reputations. For all the talk that Donald Trump has eroded and damaged our vital norms and institutions. It is the media who lent credence to his charge that they are the fake news media. It is the media themselves who broadcast to everyone, you don’t need to trust us. We are not trustworthy. I don’t know how they come back from this.

iPatriot Contributers

 

Join the conversation!

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, vulgarity, profanity, all caps, or discourteous behavior. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain a courteous and useful public environment where we can engage in reasonable discourse.

CONTACT US

Need help, have a question, or a comment? Send us an email and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Sending

Log in with your credentials

Forgot your details?