Christopher Bedford of the Federalist details a deleterious tactic employed by major media outlets.
A New York Times business correspondent in Hong Kong, a weekend editor at The Guardian who lives in New York, a British Business Insider reporter with a focus on the Saudis, and the executive editor of The Daily Beast.
A 48-year-old blogger who works for Rachel Maddow, a union activist who covers “extremism, far-right politics and media disinformation” for The Huffington Post, and the 29-year editor of the Arkansas Times.
A breaking news reporter at The Washington Post who wrapped up her most recent internship in May 2016, a 2016 University of Pennsylvania graduate who covers “young people doing big things” for Forbes, a 45-year-old former George Will intern who writes for CNN, and David Frum.
What do these people have in common, aside from their political ideology? Every one of them is a part of a machine that launders smears and opinions through newspapers, magazines, and television channels, presents the cleaned-up product as unimpeachable truth to the public, and then uses the fresh-minted facts to protect friends and hurt enemies. It’s called “the news.” …
… We’ve now heard from everyone from Rachel Maddow’s blogger to The New York Times to a 200-year old English newspaper to [Sen. Tom] Cotton’s local editor that the senator is a racist, fear-mongering conspiracy theorist who imperils us all. But was a lick of it true?
It was hard to say at the time because the vast majority of the country didn’t know much about the virus at all — although that didn’t hold any of those above back in spouting their expert opinions and shutting down Cotton’s.
Now that it’s largely accepted that the disease escaped a Chinese laboratory, have any of those above issued a correction or so much as an update? Of course not.
