The American Press Self-Deconstructs

The least surprising revelation these past few days has been this-- that the American public no longer trusts the mainstream media. After hysterically making itself an anti-Trump propaganda organ, it has lost all credibility.

Matt Taibbi takes the measure of the dereliction and begins with the much hyped story that Trump supporters were going to protest the inauguration of Joe Biden by invading all fifty of our state capitals. Remember that one? Remember what happened? Nothing-- except for a couple of Antifa riots in Portland and Seattle.

Taibbi writes:

If you tell us on January 12th that all 50 state capitols are under serious threat — I was genuinely worried — you have to tell us what happens at the end of the story a week later. Was that threat real but deterred? Was it overblown? What happened to all of those warnings?

The New York Times made itself into an organ for anti-Trump propaganda. And it wonders why no one takes it seriously. It began with the much hyped Russian collusion story-- designed to delegitimize the Trump presidency. Until an extensive investigation turned up nothing.

But the, we were regaled with stories about how Russia was weighing in on the 2020 election, in Trump’s favor. When Trump lost, the story disappeared. And the election was pronounced immaculate.

In Taibbi’s words:

This has been an ongoing theme of coverage in the Trump years: hyping a threat for a news cycle or two, then moving to the next panic as the basis for the first one dissipates. How many headlines were aimed out our outrage centers in the last four years that were quietly memory-holed, once they’d outlived their political utility? We read dozens of stories before the election warning that Russia was already interfering in the 2020 election. A smattering of New York Times headlines alone:

• Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump

• Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says

• ‘Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls Grow Stealthier in 2020

• F.B.I. Warns of Russian Interference in 2020 Race and Boosts Counterintelligence Operations

• Putin Most Likely Directing Election Interference to Aid Trump, C.I.A. Says

• 
  

The Times almost weekly quoted people like the “American official” who said Russia was like a “tornado, capable of inflicting damage on American democracy now,” or FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said there was a “very active” campaign to influence the election and “denigrate Vice President Biden.”

Then Biden won the election, the story disappeared, and the near-immediate conclusion of the same New York Times was that the election had been “free of fraud.” They quoted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as saying the 2020 vote was “the most secure in American history,” and as for all of those pre-election scare stories?

Why would anyone trust them to offer anything but distortion. Taibbi concludes that The Times had been doing nothing but propagandizing against Trump. Now it will propagandize for Biden. What does this say about those who continue to read it religiously?

Like the wider Trump-Russia story itself, which magically vanished from coverage before both the 2018 and 2020 election seasons, audiences were asked for a time to care about certain things as if their lives depended on it, then just as quickly asked to forget the issues ever came up. And they wonder why people feel manipulated?