From the discredited Steele Dossier and relentless “RussiaGate” probe that hounded Donald Trump through his entire presidency to the treatment of Kyle Rittenhouse since he shot three men during a violent demonstration in Kenosha last year, the establishment media has revealed itself to no longer be society’s watchdog but the liberal left’s lapdog.
Now at least some in the media are dining on crow, and after seeing what critics are writing about it all, the media has it coming.
Fox News is reporting how the Washington Post “made headlines last week” by correcting a couple of stories related to the Steele dossier, and now the newspaper is taking heat for having gone back and changed those stories.
Politico was stinging by its report on how “Newspaper proprietors, especially former Washington Post President and Publisher Philip L. Graham, have long subscribed to the idea that their newspaper articles constitute “the first rough draft of history.” Some first rough drafts are more accurate than others, as every journalist will concede. So when reporters uncover new information that undermines earlier copy, they write new stories, updating the record. What they don’t do is go back and erase the original, flawed version. But that’s what the Washington Post did last week.”
Yet Congressman Adam Schiff, who pushed the Steele dossier as though it were gospel, still defends his conduct. Writing at Fox News in an Op-Ed, Jonathan Turley observes, “While even the Washington Post has admitted that it got the Russian collusion story wrong in light of the findings of Special Counsel John Durham, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is still insisting that he was absolutely right to promote the discredited Steele dossier. Schiff’s interview on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ may be the final proof of the death of shame in American politics.”
With Trump out of the White House, the media had to find another target, and Rittenhouse became the whipping boy. The teen has been variously described as a “white supremacist” and “racist vigilante,” but the trial in Kenosha revealed he is none of those things.
Substack journalist Bari Weiss ripped media coverage of the Kenosha incident, writing, “Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting…you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
“This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts,” Weiss added. “It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.”
So much has been written and said, and more will be as these and other far left narratives continue to collapse, and in the final analysis, the rush to be first and famous rather than reserved and right, and to substitute opinion for fact-based reporting, has seriously, if not fatally, wounded the Fourth Estate, which is what the press was once affectionately considered.
Nowadays, the establishment media and those on the left to whom they seem to gravitate, appear to be something less.
