When All The Media Narratives Collapse – by Andrew Sullivan – The Weekly Dish

I haven t watched the whole trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you ve been led to believe a media narrative that was way off. (Independent journalists last year, like Jesse Singal, were more clear-eyed.) Because of that narrative whiplash, we may have more rioting and violence if he s acquitted. The judge is already being targeted. I m not defending Rittenhouse. And I understand news gathering is fallible. But there s a media pattern here. And it reaches far wider than Rittenhouse.

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian touted across all media, including the Washington Post has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy, said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn t mean that Trump wasn t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI s original overreach; and the mass media Rachel Maddow chief among them were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the corrections have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin and Trump s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

via andrewsullivan.substack.com

I remember when the scales fell from my eyes. It was 1980 and I read a small story in the British press that the Soviets were leaving booby-trapped *toys* for Afghani children to pick up and get their hands blown off. I thought — what, toys? Aren’t these Soviet heros involved in defending Russia from US imperialism or whatever? That was the beginning of my enlightenment. I was one year post- BA and my dreams were already crumbling. When the dust settled, I was a libertarian of some kind, distrusting all governments, or so I thought. There’s a lot of trust to undermine, it turns out.