Lying Democrats and the Evolution of Fake News and Activist Journalism-John Hinderaker
EXCERPT: Lawyer and co-Founder of the Power Line blog John Hinderaker discusses the evolution of media bias, fake news;
Transcript:
John Hinderaker: What I want to talk about in my presentation here is the evolution of the issue of media bias over the last 15 or 20 years. And I want to do that primarily by comparing and contrasting two significant milestones in that story of media bias, which I think sheds a lot of light on how things have changed since the early 2000s.
So we started the website Power Line in 2002. And media bias was one of the topics that we wrote on all the time. And in those days, reporters for newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times were relatively accessible. Their email addresses were public. And if we emailed them, as we did rather frequently, to comment on and to critique their news stories, they usually would respond. And so we got into some very interesting colloquies with some of those reporters, which resulted in a number of corrections being made to news stories. Now, those corrections were generally subsilentio, unacknowledged, certainly, as to the source. But nevertheless, that would sometimes happen. Reporters in those days wanted at least to be seen as objective and fair, even though most were, in fact, biased in the direction of the Left.
Then in 2004, an episode that became known as Rathergate occurred. “60 Minutes” tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents that put the service of President George Bush in the Texas Air National Guard, way back in the early 1970s, in a bad light. It was a complete fraud. The documents were fakes. And the fraud unraveled quickly, as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy forgeries that were full of substantive errors as well as the typographical errors that made most of the news.
What was most interesting to me, though, for the current context about the Rathergate affair is that within 12 hours after we hit the publish button on the very first installment of our post, “The 61st Minute,” which we then went on to update with input from readers throughout the day — but within 12 hours of that first publication, CBS News announced that it was launching an investigation into what had happened. And they in fact did that. They hired a former attorney general of the United States, a guy named Richard Thornburgh, to head up the investigation. And he and others eventually produced a report called the Thornburgh Report, which painted a devastating, devastating picture of what happened, of the fraud that was perpetrated by “60 Minutes.”
And as a result of that report, as a result of the facts that came out, CBS News fired Dan Rather, their longtime anchorman. And they also fired Mary Mapes, who was the real villain of the piece, the producer of the segment that falsely smeared President Bush and his Air National Guard experience. Years later, then then-head of CBS News said that the Rathergate incident represented the low point in the history of that news organization.
And the key point that I want to make here is that back in 2004, CBS News was really embarrassed that it had produced a false news report. It really did want at least to be seen as a fair and unbiased news source. And when the fraud was exposed, it took decisive action against the employees who had perpetrated it. That was in 2004.
But over the next decade, that attitude changed. Major news organizations have gone from being biased against conservatism to engaging in open warfare against conservatism. In 2016, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, publicly stated that the New York Times approach to covering the news had changed when it came to Donald Trump. No more neutrality, no more objectivity. The Times would openly attack Trump, not just in its editorials but in its news stories.
Shortly after Baquet made that announcement, the Russia collusion story hit the news. And it continued to dominate the news for the next two or three years. And of course, we all remember the Russia collusion story, this idea that President Trump had joined forces with Vladimir Putin and the Russians to somehow influence the 2016 election in his direction. And the support for that hypothesis — which on its face is totally bizarre and belied by everything that Donald Trump ever did vis-à-vis Russia — in which he stood up to Russia, unlike what the Democrats were doing, and promoted the production of American petroleum resources, which hurt the interests of the Russians more than anything else that could’ve been done. But nevertheless, the only support for that hypothesis was the so-called Steele Dossier.
Well, the so-called Steele Dossier was a complete fraud. It was paid for the Hillary Clinton campaign and brokered by Marc Elias, who some of you heard a lot about in Mollie Hemmingway’s presentation just a little while ago. And who was it who promoted the fraud of the Steele Dossier? It was not fringe news sources on the Left, no. It was promoted primarily and overwhelmingly by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and other allegedly mainstream news outlets.
I would submit that the Steele Dossier never had any plausibility, let alone any proof, to support its allegations. And I believe that the journalists who promoted it knew that in all likelihood they were promoting lies. But they didn’t care. Their mission was to help Hillary Clinton win the election, and failing that, to hamstring the incoming Donald Trump Administration. And in that last goal, they wound up succeeding very well.
Now, the Russia collusion story has long been exposed as a hoax. Bob Mueller and his team of partisan zealots couldn’t find a shred of evidence to support its allegations. And the investigations of Devin Nunez and John Durham have shed plenty of light on how exactly the fraud was perpetrated.
But here’s the point. Has any liberal news organization launched an internal investigation, as CBS did back in 2004, to try to find out what happened; how could they have been so wrong about a story that they promoted so heavily? Has any major news organization taken that approach? The answer is no. Not one.
Has any reporter or editor who promoted the Russia collusion hoax and made that the centerpiece, really, of liberal news reporting for, what, a year, two years, three years — have any of the reporters and editors who promoted that hoax been fired, like Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were fired? The answer is no. Not a single one. And a number of these news organizations won Pulitzer Prizes for promoting the Russia collusion hoax and the Steele Dossier. Have any of those Pulitzer Prizes been returned? The answer, obviously, is no. As best I can tell, the liberal reporters and editors who promoted that story are not in the least embarrassed that the story turned out to be a clumsy fraud that was perpetrated by the Democratic Party.
On the contrary, I think they are proud of what they did. I think the fact that the story turned out to be a hoax simply emphasizes the fact that they were willing to make sacrifices — emphasizes, shows how far they were willing to go for the liberal cause, for the anticonservative cause. I think it is to them a point of pride. Their mission was to bring down Donald Trump. And the Russia collusion hoax played a major role in what ultimately turned out to be a successful effort.
So I think if you juxtapose those two stories, they illustrate how we have gone from liberal media bias in the earlier years of the 21st century to the open warfare on conservatism that we are seeing from the left-wing, the dominant, media today. And it’s not just Donald Trump. When Dean Baquet made his announcement about the changing philosophy at the New York Times, he tied it specifically to then-candidate Donald Trump. But it’s not just Trump. The same posture of open advocacy, open warfare against all conservatives and all conservative causes persists in liberal media today.
And the only other thing that I want to add, before I turn it over to Joe and to a more general discussion, is that the dominant social media platforms are now playing an important role in amplifying the left-wing propaganda that is produced by the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and so forth. The social media giants uniformly view these far left-wing organs as mainstream news organizations that are really beyond question and beyond reproach. And they feature them prominently on, for example, Facebook and on Apple News. And no news story from the New York Times or the Washington Post has ever been banned by Twitter. So social media companies right now, I think, are very prominent in perpetrating or perpetuating the outdated idea that these media are merely biased but nevertheless still mainstream.
So that is where I see the media landscape today. That’s how I think it has evolved over the last 15 to 20 years. I think the big question remaining is what are we going to do about it. And I’ll defer that for the ongoing discussion. Thank you very much.
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