Media Disinformation

Gerard Baker at WSJ offers a catalogue of stories that have been promoted by the progressive media in recent years, all of which turned out to be false.

According to so much of what we read and heard:

• Kyle Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist.
• Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist.
• Donald Trump won in 2016 only because he colluded with the Kremlin.
• Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington Catholic High School on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was an entitled white bigot.
• Mr. Trump said the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “good people.”
• Last year’s riots were mostly peaceful.
• Unarmed black men are routinely shot in huge numbers by police officers.
• The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plot.

Every one of these assertions by the media was false. So were these:

• Inflation isn’t a problem.
• Andrew Cuomo was America’s greatest governor.
• Republican-run states are killing people with their anti-science Covid policies.
• A white man killed a succession of Asian-Americans in Georgia in a fit of racist rage.
• Russians offered cash bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers.
• Anyone who suggested the pandemic started in a Chinese laboratory was a racist.
• Mr. Trump’s postmaster general was stealing mailboxes.

Baker could've added many more examples, including the media's willingness to believe Jussie Smollett and, in 2006, Crystal Magnum in the Duke lacrosse case.

The stories were false and the media that perpetrated them often knew they were false, but they kept pushing them anyway. If it were the case that this only happened occasionally and that when it did the media were quick to correct their story, that would be forgivable, but that's obviously not what usually happens.

As in the Trump/Russia collusion case the media pushes the falsehood until they can no longer sustain it and then they quietly move on to the next fabrication. No apology, no regret, and usually no retraction.

It's why the late Rush Limbaugh often likened them to drive-by shooters who leave their victims bleeding in the street while they speed off to find their next victim.

Why do they do this? There seem to be three possible answers. Either they're simply not very bright, or they're not very honest, or they're maliciously trying to tear people, and our institutions, down by any means necessary.

A fourth possibility is that they're actually all three.

In any case, it'd be folly to naively accept whatever we hear on network or cable television, or read on social media and in the major leftist journals. Too many of these people are unconstrained by any sense of a duty to tell the truth.

It may be hard to believe that they would lie to us so deliberately and so earnestly, yet when it happens over and over again with rarely, if ever, any sign of remorse or indication of professional embarrassment one has to be at least suspicious that the falsehoods are deliberate and that we are being purposely deceived.

Perhaps the best response is not to give up trying to know what's going on in the world but rather to develop a healthy skepticism, especially toward those sources of information which have a track record of promoting stories and allegations which later are shown to have been false.

Credibility, after all, is something that must be earned and scrupulously maintained. Too much of our media has squandered any reputation they may have had for integrity and forfeited the trust of honest, thinking people.