I invite everyone to take a trip in Matt Orfalea's Lab Leak Time Machine. While on your journey, notice the sneering tone of voice of these dozens of wanna-be journalists. This is how "the news" is often announced these days. Fact-free and sprinkled with condescension for those who dare to stray from the official narrative.
Sharyl Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for Investigative Reporting. She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers including “The Smear How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think and How you Vote.” For 30 years Attkisson was a correspondent and anchor at CBS News, PBS, CNN and local news and she is now the host of a weekly show, “Full measure,” which focuses on investigative and accountability reporting. Excerpt from her discussion with Steve Kirsch.
Steve Kirsh: How are people being misled and how can we tell when people are telling you the truth?Sharyl Attkisson : I think some important trends started in the past 15 to 20 years and have become more visible as time has gone on. Now you have to dig deeper. When you hear a prevalent narrative on the news, if you understand how the news has been co opted--like virtually every source of information that we use--you have to almost think two layers beyond what they're trying to tell you.
Number one, you have to assume that when everybody's on the same narrative, typically, if they're using the same language, interviewing the same experts all on board saying everybody knows something, then that's your cue that there's probably a really important piece of the puzzle that's being hidden by some important interest that would suffer if we knew the truth. So as you hear these narratives, your first thought should be "Who wants me to believe this and why?" And I know that ordinary people, including me, when I'm just leading my normal life, we don't have time to deeply research, every question that arises. We are used to counting on the news to help us do that. But I'm telling you today, you kind of have to rely on yourself, because there are very few sources you can go to where you can trust the information as being unfettered and dual-sided, presenting all viewpoints.
A lot of it is just purely strategic for the past five or six years, dishonest, not just even out of context, but completely false. But you'll never know if you're trusting your traditional source that we used to look to for such things.
This has never been truer than when we look at the COVID pandemic and the vaccines. And I certainly didn't know at the front end of the pandemic, what the truth was any more than anybody else did about how effective the vaccines might be, how bad the pandemic would be. But as time went on, this began to take on hallmarks of every other scandal that I've covered, including many non-medical scandals, where there are important interests, trying very hard to shape and censor information, trying to control the landscape where we get all of our information online, on the news, any source that we have. And I think it resulted in a lot of harm, number one, but number two, maybe irreparable damage to the credibility of the institutions that we rely on political institutions, medical institutions, law enforcement, whatever you're looking at, Department of Justice, media. People, by and large as a good chunk of the population, don't believe--nor should they--take at face value, what comes out of their mouths in terms of advice, and their fact checks, and so on.
Steve Kirsch: So what is your trusted sources that you rely on today?
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Almost impossible to overstate how wrong so many news corporations were on the science of covid: - lab leak as conspiracy - efficacy of lockdown - harmlessness of school closures - recovered immunity - toddler masking - vax mandates A perfect record of anti- science failure.
Chris Hedges, who no one has ever called a conservative, writes:
The failure to report accurately on the Trump-Russia saga for the four years of the Trump presidency is bad enough. What is worse, major media organizations, which produced thousands of stories and reports that were false, refuse to engage in a serious postmortem. The systematic failure was so egregious and widespread that it casts a very troubling shadow over the press. How do CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Mother Jones admit that for four years they reported salacious, unverified gossip as fact? How do they level with viewers and readers that the most basic rules of journalism were ignored to participate in a witch hunt, a virulent New McCarthyism? How do they explain to the public that their hatred for Trump led them to accuse him, for years, of activities and crimes he did not commit? How do they justify their current lack of transparency and dishonesty? It is not a pretty confession, which is why it won’t happen. The U.S. media has the lowest credibility — 26 percent — among 46 nations, according to a 2022 report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And with good reason....
The advent of digital media and the compartmentalizing of the public into antagonistic demographics has destroyed the traditional model of commercial journalism. Devastated by a loss of advertising revenue and a steep decline in viewers and readers, the commercial media has a vested interest in catering to those who remain. The approximately three and a half million digital news subscribers The New York Times gained during the Trump presidency were, internal surveys found, overwhelmingly anti-Trump. A feedback loop began where the paper fed its digital subscribers what they wanted to hear. Digital subscribers, it turns out, are also very thin-skinned.
“If the paper reported something that could be interpreted as supportive of Trump or not sufficiently critical of Trump,” Jeff Gerth, an investigative journalist who spent many years at The New York Times recently told me, they would sometimes “drop their subscription or go on social media and complain about it.”
Giving subscribers what they want makes commercial sense. However, it is not journalism.
Matt Taibbi's recent Tweet thread noting the silence by the mainstream media when it comes to stunning revelations based on the Twitter Files.
Instead of taking as leads stories like Hamilton 68 or CENTCOM’s fake social media accounts abroad or the FBI, DOS and DHS cranking out thousands of moderation requests, “reputable” journalists are spending all their time attacking me and throwing stupid partisan tantrums. Why?Because they’re not real journalists. The lot of them are invested in protecting people in power and defending their own screwups (like their stories about #ReleaseTheMemo being driven by Russian bots), so they’re refusing to follow up on dozens of newsworthy stories.
How journalism works when the press is real: One reporter does a story. It may not be the whole story, but it’s newsworthy. The next reporter finds the next piece of the puzzle. A third adds more. We compete, but all push the story forward. The TF response exposes a fake press:
This is why I now have to hire people to help chase down all the stuff in the Twitter Files — because the “community” of reputable journalists not only won’t investigate as they once would have, they’re trying to shut such inquiries down.
Based on what passes as "news" in most regional and national outlets, Joseph Pulitzer must be spinning in his grave. Here is his 1907 Platform:
I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.JOSEPH PULITZER • APRIL 10, 1907
