Tea at Trianon: Why Is The Media So Biased?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Why Is The Media So Biased?

From Public:

The media’s mishandling of Russiagate is responsible for declining trust in the media, argues a major four-part series in the progressive magazine, The Columbia Journalism Review. “Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive,” notes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeff Gerth. “Today, the US media has the lowest credibility — 26 percent — among forty-six nations.” A big part of the reason for that, Gerth suggests, was a barrage of one-sided media coverage since 2016 falsely claiming that President Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, sometimes referred to as Russiagate.
At the end of the series, Gerth explained why he wrote it. “I’ve avoided opining in my more than 50 years as a reporter,” he writes. “This time, however, I felt obligated to weigh in. Why? Because I am worried about journalism’s declining credibility and society’s increasing polarization…. journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work.”
After the 2016 presidential election, writes Gerth, “the Times produced a steady stream of stories about whether Trump conspired with Russians to win the election without knowing whether the allegation was actually true…. Paul Krugman, in his Times column called Trump the ‘Siberian candidate,’ citing the [alleged] ‘watering down’ of the [GOP] platform [by Trump to make it less anti-Russia]. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a ‘de facto agent’ of Putin.”
Meanwhile, people within the FBI were debunking the news media coverage. The day before Trump’s inauguration, the Times published a story: “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry into Trump.” The piece evoked a strong reaction from FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was leading the FBI inquiry. Strzok said, about the piece that there was “no substance and largely wrong…the press is going to undermine its credibility.” Strzok’s admission is important because an investigation later revealed that Strzok was famously anti-Trump. Before the election, when a colleague asked whether Trump would “ever become president,” Strzok said, “No. No, he won’t. We’ll stop it”
Not all journalists got Russiagate wrong. Gerth quotes reporters Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times criticizing the media’s coverage. And Gerth singles out Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Aaron Maté as three journalists who got the story right (he could have also included Michael Tracey), and accurately debunked other news media’s coverage of the allegations and evidence. Gerth also credits Michael Isikoff, a well-known investigative journalist who has worked for the Washington Post, Yahoo News, and other publications, for changing his news coverage after uncritically reporting on an infamous memo written by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, which suggested, among other things, that the Russian government-controlled Trump by hiring prostitutes to urinate on him.
But the whole of the news media got the story wrong. There is little evidence that either Woodward or Friedman did much either in their own reporting or within their institutions to contradict the barrage of stories reinforcing the Russiagate hoax. Taibbi, Greenwald, and Maté wrote for alternative publications, not the mainstream news media, and Greenwald famously left the publication he co-founded after his own editors tried to distort his reporting around Hunter Biden’s laptop. “It was a career-changing moment for me,” Taibbi told Gerth. The “more neutral approach” to reporting “went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative — the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.” (Read more.)

From The Post-Millennial:

"Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska perform global malign influence on behalf of the Kremlin and are associated with acts of bribery, extortion, and violence," Driscoll said. "As alleged, Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov, both U.S. citizens, acted on behalf of Deripaska and fraudulently used a U.S. entity to obscure their activity in violation of U.S. sanctions. After sanctions are imposed, they must be enforced equally against all U.S. citizens in order to be successful. There are no exceptions for anyone, including a former FBI official like Mr. McGonigal."

Sergey Shestakov, a court interpreter who assisted in investigating Russian oligarchs for the FBI, was also arrested Saturday for his ties to Deripaska. 54-year-old McGonigal, who retired in 2018, was arrested at JFK airport after arriving in the US from Sri Lanka. McGonigal "is charged with violating US sanctions by trying to get Deripaska off the sanctions list," reports CBS. (Read more.)