I was left to wonder why, when the Mueller Report summary hit the streets, as released by Attorney General William Barr, that the leftist media was blind to the possibility that Trump didn’t collude? Don’t get me wrong, the answer is self-evident; Trump colluding is what the media wanted to believe. Today, the main stream media (MSM) still want to believe Trump colluded with Russians.
On March 24th, upon the release of the Mueller results, host of the ironically named ‘Reliable Sources’, a forlorn Brian Stelter was reeling from the his network’s failure. You can’t begrudge him defending his team in the face of failure. In a defense, Brian stated, “The press is just following a trail that Trump created. He has proven time and time again he cannot be trusted. He is so dishonest that even America’s allies don’t know what to believe.”
“The press is just following a trail that Trump created. He has proven time and time again he cannot be trusted. He is so dishonest that even America’s allies don’t know what to believe.”
If your network’s coverage was so bad that it required an apology, you mustn’t have done a terribly good job.
As you hear Brian tell it, Trump ‘is so dishonest‘. I challenge anyone to produce an honest politician. Anyone. When such a politician is found, I’ll happily feed their unicorn.
Nonetheless, this is the base assumption of Stelter and his ilk; that, as the basis of so-called objective journalism, their opinion of Trump is that of a liar. This is the the baseline for Trump coverage. Whether true or not, objectivity precludes a conclusion. if you will.
In further defense of his network’s failure, he posits the following, “If I had to pick speculation or solid reporting, I would pick solid reporting in a second.”
“If I had to pick speculation or solid reporting, I would
pick solid reporting in a second.”
Then why was Fox News was right on the Mueller probe and your network, CNN, was so spectacularly wrong, Brian?
Stelter has a long history of bagging on Fox. Look up his Reliable Sources YouTube channel, there’s at least twenty entries with the subject of ‘Fox’. To be fair to Brian, between Fox’s Greg Gutfeld and Tucker Carlson, there is a fair bit of skewering from the Fox camp. I suppose it makes sense that he hits back.
One of the key claims of Mr. Stelter is the cozy relationship between President Trump and Fox news. He’s not off-base. During a recent Trump rally, the president name checked a number of Fox hosts, “…and Laura and Steve and Ainsley and Tucker and Jeanine. Jeanine is back, going to be back on Saturday night. Jeanine, right? And even Greg likes me now. Greg. He started a little slow.”
“…and Laura and Steve and Ainsley and Tucker and Jeanine. Jeanine is back, going to be back on Saturday night. Jeanine, right? And even Greg likes me now. Greg. He started a little slow.”
To say the least, that’s pretty darned cozy. Duly noted by Stelter on the Trump/Fox coziness a few months back:
Stelter isn’t wrong regarding the president’s relationship with Fox. It’s the total and utter lack of awareness of the main stream media’s lockstep relationship with the left that seems surprising. The MSM doesn’t see it that way. No different than recent love affair of Trump with Fox, the left has a decades long incestuousness affair with the media.
In 2010, Ezra Klein (currently of Vox, previously of the Washington Post), founded an online forum called Journolist. It was really more of an email distribution list (listserv) of left leaning journalists, academics, bloggers and liberal strategists. Was this so-called Journolist more a conspiratorial cabal of lefty journos plotting the next talking point?
If you look for a conspiratorial smoking gun in the Journalist group, you won’t find it. You don’t need to. There will be no, ‘Hey, let’s all publish these same talking points’. There’s no such smoking gun and nor does there need to be.
Contemplate for a moment one Journolist discussion about a proposed counter strategy regarding then Candidate Obama’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. You should first consider that simply talking about a counter strategy is enough of an issue on its own. However, list member Spencer Ackerman uncorked this suggestion, “…an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.””
On Jeremiah Wright: “..an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists.”.
What Ackerman proposed; the ruination of another person’s life based on absolutely nothing. Nothing. Simply because he doesn’t like the conservative talking point, go ahead reign a potentially ruinous claim upon someone that is otherwise innocent. That was his proposed strategy. Lovely.
Ackerman was not some fringe blogger, he has been associated with respectable left leaning journals such as the New Republic, Guardian US and Wired. Other list members were from Newsweek, the New Yorker, Politico and included everyone’s favorite economist, Paul Krugman.
When Journolist’s existence became public, list members pushed back on the idea that the list was ‘agenda driven’. They stated it was simply a forum through which they could chat and have instant analysis.
That may have been the idea as well as the problem; throwing around leftist ideas in a protected forum. A forum that allows members to ‘let their hair down’ politically. It’s immaterial whether or not there’s a smoking gun, the problem is that Journolist existed at all!
I’m not a fool, of course it did. As I’m sure there are now similarly closed groups on Facebook.
Though Journolist was not exactly the devious cabal of evil liberal media types, it was hidden for a reason. Recall that Trump name checked Fox personalities? It should be noted that those whom he names were Fox opinion personalities and he mentions them publicly.
See the difference?
CNN represents itself as objective journalism. Nonetheless, with the advent of Trump, it seems all bets are off. Recently, former CBS journalist Lara Logan called out the so-called objective journos, “But I really want to know is, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, are they opinion hosts? Are these opinion shows or are these news programs? Because that is an important distinction.”
“But I really want to know is, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, are
they opinion hosts? Are these opinion shows or are these news programs? Because that is an important distinction.”
She had previously mentioned during an online podcast that, “It’s the same group of people; they’re already starting to target me again now…Michael Calderon, who was at The Huffington Post. I can literally give you the script now. I can tell you who the players are: Joe Hagan, Brian Stelter. I mean, it’s the same people all the time and they’re all saying the same things.”
Like Sharyl Attkisson and Bernard Goldberg before her, if you choose to leave the cesspool of media leftists, you’re a pariah to be publicly ridiculed. If Stelter claims to pick ‘solid reporting’ first, he must then be defining ‘reporting’ as that which agrees with his worldview.
The days that followed the Mueller/Barr summary release, you’d think the only thing the media would talk about were the Mueller probe results. The final report would be big news! It had dominated CNN news cycles for the greater part of two years.
Astutely recognizing the need to ‘change the subject’ after the Mueller summary, Nancy Pelosi told the press she hopes they would focus on healthcare. You can’t fault Nancy for trying. Who wouldn’t try changing the subject. Your team had an enormous amount of egg on its face. Speaker Pelosi tried a bait-n-switch slight-of-hand trick. Albeit a rather weak try. Still, she tried.
Following her lead, CNN’s evening line-ups took her press missive as marching orders. So clearly did CNN want to avoid further Mueller discussion that they accepted the Speaker’s challenge. According to a Tucker Carlson monologue, “Between 7 p.m. and midnight Tuesday night, every show on CNN followed Nancy Pelosi’s instructions. Every single show talked about health care, and every single one channeled Nancy Pelosi’s views on health care. She could have been writing the scripts; maybe she was.”
“Between 7 p.m. and midnight Tuesday night, every show
on CNN followed Nancy Pelosi’s instructions. Every
single show talked about health care, and every single one
channeled Nancy Pelosi’s views on health care. She
could have been writing the scripts; maybe she was.”
Carlson stated further regarding CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “On Tuesday night, the governor’s brother read his party’s talking points as if off a cue card.”
The epitome of all that wrong in the nexus of leftists and the media, Cuomo’s faithfulness to the leftist talking points it is ample evidence of, if tacitly so, the collusion between the left’s leaders and the MSM. When Chris says ‘Let’s get after it.”, he means to say ‘let’s get after conservative’s dopey ideas and then start selling leftism to America’.
He also represents what is clearly wrong in the MSM: The revolving door.
Cuomo has a spotless liberal pedigree. Not only is he the brother of the current Democrat New York governor but also the son of the former Democrat New York governor, Mario Cuomo. In the media, Chris is golden. He’s connected, Ivy League educated and from within ‘the bubble’. He’s got the proper cred to warrant a choice media gig.
This is nothing new. Are you a Democrat office holder, leftist administration member or just float around the liberal political flame? You’re snapped up for plum gigs in the media.
According to ABC morning host Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos is called ‘the smart one’ on Good Morning America. He a former Clinton Administration official. Former DNC chair Donna Brazile not only was a CNN contributor but was responsible for leaking primary debate questions to the Clinton campaign.
So complete is the near infinite loop of former Democrat officials and their ability to rotate within the ‘Leftist Media Industrial Complex’, the peeps within this loop can’t even see this as a problem. To be fair, it isn’t unique to the MSM and CNN; Fox has done the same with the Trump administration by recruiting former Fox on-air personalities such as Larry Kudlow and recently, Morgan Ortegas.
The difference being; these were Fox opinion personalities. Stephanopoulos, both on GMA and his Sunday morning show, is held out by ABC as objective. He is not.
Obviously referring to this media/leftist loop as ‘Leftist Media Industrial Complex’ is a play on the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ (MIC) originally posited by Dwight Eisenhower. The Wiki definition of the MIC is; “The military–industrial complex (MIC) is an informal alliance between a nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. A driving factor behind this relationship between the government and defense-minded corporations is that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining war weapons, and the other from being paid to supply them.”
Emphasis on the mutual benefit of the defense industry with the government.
Is this materially different than the ‘Leftist Media Industrial Complex’ (let’s call it LMIC)? A better known definition exists as the ‘Politico-Media Complex’. Such a broad definition doesn’t delineate clearly that it’s leftists in the ‘Complex’, as with my suggestion of ‘LMIC’.
If I were to define LMIC, it would be; an alliance of the nation’s liberal leaning government officials and the leftist news media. Both with a vested interest in implanting leftist ideology in the minds of the American people with the benefit of maintaining control of the population and ensuring their position of power and influence.
“An alliance of the nation’s liberal leaning government officials and the news media, both with a vested interest in implanting leftist ideology in the minds of the American people with the benefit of maintaining control of the population and ensuring their position of power and influence.”
Donald Trump makes no bones about his disdain for the liberal MSM. Calls of #FakeNews to the formerly trusted sources, like the networks or CNN, has only inflamed a petulant press quick to defend a bad job. When Stelter defended CNN’s abject failure that lasted the greater part of two years, he is simply defending the talking point driven ‘churnalism’ (the practice of regurgitating content of other sources) that his organization peddles.
CNN did little to investigate for themselves the claims of their guests. Sure, Stelter tells us he likes facts, but the feedback loop of favored talking points only served to simply get the story wrong. Every time. For two years.
On CNN, in August of 2018, veteran journalist and now professional leftist, Carl Bernstein told Wolf Blitzer, “I think it’s time to recognize that what we are watching in the Trump presidency is worse than Watergate…It’s worse than Watergate, as I say, because the system worked in Watergate.”
The only reason you have Carl Bernstein commenting on the Russia probe is so that you get the name ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Watergate’ in the same segment. Bernstein is no longer a connected journalist with fresh sources. Versus true investigative journalism with Russiagate, the media opted for a blowhard whose best days are past him.
Bernstein can bloviate about Watergate with an implied voice of authority. I can authoritatively bloviate about ‘purple flying bunnies’. Neither is more true than the other.
They’d have been better served keeping self-described centrist liberal professor and lawyer, Alan Dershowitz in the Rolodex. Instead, the media stopped inviting him to panel discussions because he poo-poo’d Anti-Trump leftist narratives by crazily applying logic and actual law.
Like the character Norma Desmond, a long washed up silent film actress in the 1950 noir film, Sunset Boulevard, actor Gloria Swanson declared “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”, the leftist media and the imbedded government employees simply cannot accept that a significant number of Americans wanted Donald Trump as president. Like Norma Desmond, the media harken back to the day where they were masters of all that was newsy. And Dan Rathery.
By simply not seeing outside the LMIC loop, the band of likeminded ‘Leftist Media Industrial Complex’ elites failed to see an outcome other than the outcome they dearly wished to see; a criminal Trump. Because of this, the MSM and colluding government employees saw to it that they became the fools and thereby only strengthened the hand and fake news claim of the very person they’d wished to bring down, Donald J. Trump.
Some day, it will be a Brian Stelter that descends the grand staircase to declare that ‘I’m ready for my monologue Mr. Blitzer.’ to the saddened eyes of his handlers that know his best day have passed.
…at which point, he’ll become a Democrat White House Press Secretary.
