Year-end is a time for reflection and all sorts of lists. With that in mind, the Daily Caller compiled a list of what it considers the greatest, i.e., the worst, hate crime hoaxes of 2019 that the mainstream media pushed as legit. See the video embedded below.
Similarly, the Washington Free Beacon assembled a 2019 compilation of conspiracy TV MSNBC supercut:
Further on the subject of hoaxes, there a few intellectually honest left-wing yet simultaneously anti-Trump journalists who called out “news outlets” such as MSNBC and others for their obsessive coverage of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
This exclusive non-echo-chamber club includes Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone and Aaron Mate.
Dossier Deflection
Finally, a conventional liberal journalist has taken MSNBC star Rachel Maddow to task for her unhinged Russiagate rhetoric, especially in the context of the unverified (i.e., fake) Russian-sourced dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats used as a pretext to spy on the Trump presidential campaign.
Writes Washington Post media critic Eric Wemple in the aftermath of the release of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report:
“The ubiquity of Horowitz’s debunking passages suggests that he wanted the public to come away with the impression that the dossier was a flabby, hasty, precipitous, conclusory charade of a document. Viewers of certain MSNBC fare were surely blindsided by the news, if they ever even heard it…
“When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.
“And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found other topics more compelling.
“She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”
Defrauding the Viewership
Prof. William Jacobson, who runs Legal Insurrection website, added the following about Rachel Maddow:
“Rachel Maddow gets my nod as the Worst Media Person for 2016-2019. She deserves that title not because she’s anti-Trump deranged — so are most of the hosts and guests on MSNBC and CNN, and large numbers of reporters and opinion-makers at major newspapers.
“And Maddow’s not the worst at MSNBC — Lawrence O’Donnell is hate-filled and angry, but no one takes his intellect seriously. Maddow, by contrast, managed to defraud her own viewers with pungent conspiracy fear-mongering that has led them down a dark dead-ended alleyway, while maintaining the patina of intellectualism…
“Maddow deserves a special place in the media hall of shame because she has clung to Russia-collusion, and used it to build her audience, long after other mainstream Trump-haters had moved on to other supposed Trump-defects. She just can’t give it up.
“Alex Jones is deplatformed, while Maddow still remains atop the MSNBC heap.
“Some conspiracy fear-mongers are more equal than others.”
The Media Has No Credibility
At the far-left Intercept website, Greenwald weighed in on the IG report and the related media malpractice:
[T]he long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds.
“Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI’s gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.
“If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is?…
“But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false…
“The narrative manufactured by the security state agencies and laundered by their reliable media servants about these critical matters was a sham, a fraud, a lie. Yet again, U.S. discourse was subsumed by propaganda because the U.S. media and key parts of the security state have decided that subverting the Trump presidency is of such a high priority – that their political judgment outweighs the results of the election – that everything, including outright lying even to courts let alone the public, is justified because the ends are so noble…
“Perhaps these revelations will finally lead to a realization about how rogue, and dangerous, these police state agencies have become, and how urgently needed is serious reform. But if nothing else, it must serve as a tonic to the three years of unrelenting media propaganda that has deceived and misled millions of Americans into believing things that are simply untrue.
“None of these journalists have acknowledged an iota of error in the wake of this report because they know that lying is not just permitted but encouraged as long as it pleases and vindicates the political beliefs of their audiences. Until that stops, credibility and faith in journalism will never be restored, and – despite how toxic it is to have a media that has no claim on credibility – that despised status will be fully deserved.”
Don’t Take Maddow Literally?
Maddow and her corporate bosses are also facing a Russia-hoax-related defamation lawsuit, Culttture reports, in which she is advancing a rather ironic defense.
“One America News (OAN) is in court against MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow in a $10 million lawsuit after Maddow said her conservative competitor ‘really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.’ Now, Maddow is arguing in court that her words should not be taken as fact. Her actual legal defense, put out in a motion by her lawyer Theodore Boutrous Jr., reads: ‘…the liberal host was clearly offering up her ‘own unique expression’ of her views to capture what she saw as the ‘ridiculous’ nature of the undisputed facts. Her comment, therefore, is a quintessential statement ‘of rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proved true or false’… OAN’s lawsuit also named MSNBC, Comcast, and NBC Universal Media as defendants, and accuses Comcast, MSNBC’s parent company, of ‘anti-competitive censorship’ because the network refuses to carry OAN as part of its cable package.”
Added: Grabien’s 12 most mortifying media moments of 2019:
[Featured image credit: John Iglar/Pixabay]
