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Home » The MSM: playing the “confirmation via gossip” game

The MSM: playing the “confirmation via gossip” game

The New Neo Posted on by

Is there anyone out there whose vote has been changed by the current MSM attack on Trump? You know, the one that quotes four anonymous sourcing as saying that Trump called American war dead “losers” and “suckers”?

I believe that most people made their minds up long ago on how to vote in the 2020 presidential race. As for anyone undecided, those people puzzle me, and so I can’t figure out what they think. But the MSM has lost so much credibility, and anonymous sources have been wrong so many times, that anyone paying a particle of attention would write this story off.

The press is trying to inflate the story by claiming it’s been “confirmed”:

And who are these witnesses? Well, that’s the problem: we don’t know. The Atlantic refuses to say who they are. The Atlantic claims that they want to remain anonymous. Why? Because they’re afraid of mean tweets. No, I am not making this up. Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic actually said this and expected to be taken seriously.

So the story smells bad from the get-go.

The smell gets worse, though, as other witnesses in that meeting came forward denying that Trump said anything remotely like what is being claimed. And one of those witnesses is John Bolton, certainly no Trump fan…

There waa a lot of silly talk on social media over the weekend that the story has been “confirmed” by various news agencies, i.e the AP, Washington Post, and even Fox News. But what does “confirmed” mean in this context? See, it’s starting to sound a lot like the Ukraine hoax where some anonymous whistleblower said something which was attested to by some other guys who, as subsequent questioning revealed, weren’t first-hand witnesses at all. So their “confirmation” was pretty much worthless.

So basically what we have are news agencies “confirming” the story by pointing at other reporting the same thing. This is not reporting. This is a circle jerk.

Well:

Now Trump has not only denied he ever said that, but he’s added tweets saying “I never called John a loser.” That last bit piqued my interest, because I thought I remembered Trump calling McCain a loser for being captured during the Vietnam War, and the Snopes article I just linked quotes Trump saying that McCain was a loser, and criticizing his being captured.

Not Trump’s finest hour, IMHO.

However, I believe that the MSM would like the reader to think that Trump called McCain a “loser” because he was captured, and that this somehow confirms their hit piece in which they say he called war dead “losers.” Yes, Trump called McCain a loser, despite his denial. But it wasn’t for his Vietnam War record. It was because John McCain lost the 2008 election to Obama.

In other words, Trump called McCain a loser because McCain was a loser in 2008. Ho hum. The reason the topic of McCain’s being taken prisoner came up in that same interview was this:

[The discussion occurred at] an appearance then-candidate Trump made at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. Conservative pollster Frank Luntz asked Trump if it was appropriate for a man running for the country’s highest office to refer to McCain — a war hero and navy pilot who became a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down over Vietnam — as a “dummy.”

Trump said: “He lost [the 2008 election], so I never liked him as much after that because I don’t like losers.”

When Luntz repeated that McCain was a war hero, Trump said: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

So Trump did use the “loser” designation for McCain. But it was in the context of McCain’s 2008 loss. Trump even added that it was after that loss the he stopped liking McCain: “I never liked him as much after that…” Trump himself makes no link between the “loser” accusation and McCain’s war record; the link is Luntz’s, and Trump merely says that McCain wasn’t a war hero.

I’m so sick of the MSM. With very few exceptions, they have no integrity whatsoever. As General Sherman said:

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

In 2005 I wrote a lengthy post on the history of the anonymous source, and I reposted it here. As with so many things, it began with Watergate:

As trust in the press grew, it seems that the time-honored journalistic methods of sourcing, previously acting as a system of checks and balances against the power of the press, were now considered unnecessary.

The most famous anonymous source of them all, of course, was Deep Throat of Watergate fame. He was not only a seminal figure in Nixon’s denouement (and thus a hero to liberals everywhere), but he was so renowned that he had his own nickname, taken from a popular porn flick. It turns out that Deep Throat had another claim to fame: he was the trailblazer in the practice of relying on anonymous sources, now so commonplace in today’s journalism.

I had suspected all along that Watergate might be at the heart of it, but it was difficult to document when I first tried to do some online research on the subject. I finally struck pay dirt with this article [note: the link is now dead] from American Journalism Review…It turns out Watergate was indeed a watershed in the use of this practice.

I suggest you read the whole post. But here’s another quote (from another dead link, this time to a 1998 interview with Allen H. Neuharth, the founder of USA Today) [my emphasis]:

Traditionally journalists were taught to believe in accuracy above all else. And that changed. I think it changed with Watergate, and I think the anonymous source is the most evil thing that newspapers and the media have adopted or adapted in the last 25 years [said in 1998]. It started with Watergate, (when) journalists coming off college campuses (were) determined to be (Bob) Woodward or (Carl) Bernstein. They believed that because of Watergate’s successes there was dirt under every mat in front of every office. They came out as young cynics. The journalists of my generation were taught to be skeptics. And there’s a hell of a difference between a skeptic and a cynic. All you need to do is be accurate and fair.

Neuharth said that in 1998. I wrote the original post in 2005, and the revised version in 2017. Now I would add that today’s “journalists” are neither skeptics nor cynics. They are leftist true believers, working for a cause: the installation of a permanent leftist elite authority controlling the press, the government, and everything else. They are propagandists, and that should be clear by now to every single American.

Comments

The MSM: playing the “confirmation via gossip” game — 27 Comments

  2. There are few journalists anymore. Nearly every article, story or newcast are filled with opinions disguised or not. News is now Narrative, the story that must be told in a particular way.

    Leave out the inconvenient parts if possible. If you have to have a nonsupporting character, find the least sympathetic to provide it.

    Fact checks are the same. They are filled with True But allegedly to provide nuance but really only support the Narrative the person making it wants to.

  3. It’s true that John McCain was captured, and that in itself does not make him a war hero. But if, as I’ve heard, he turned down the chance to be released, refusing to leave his fellow captives behind, and thus prolonging his own imprisonment and torture, then that would make him a hero, in my book. And I say this as no fan of McCain.

  5. The gaslighting never ends. They aren’t even competent at it (thankfully).

    The greatest accomplishment of Trump’s first four years has been exposing and inducing the news media to hit 11 on the crazed, hate-filled, left-wing activist meter.

  6. That is why they like to be called “journalists” instead of “reporters.” Journalists write narratives, reporters dig out facts.

  7. MollyG:

    I agree. At the time, Trump’s remarks offended me, and I wrote about it. Since then, I have come to dislike McCain more and more – particularly for his behavior during the last few years of his life, and for his lackluster performance in 2008. But that doesn’t change my opinion that he did heroic things, particularly during his military service (and not just as a prisoner of war, either). I wrote about it in 2017 and criticized Trump for his remarks. My opinion hasn’t changed on that, either; as I wrote in the present post, this was not Trump’s finest hour.

    But it is irrelevant to the hit job the MSM is trying to perpetrate. They’re bringing up a whole new – and almost certainly fake – slur on Trump.

    I will add that I wonder whether McCain’s really awful behavior towards the end of his life, vis a vis sabotaging the Obamacare repeal as well as helping the coup against Trump, was partly a function of his brain tumor. We don’t know how that factored in.

  8. Frankly, I don’t think Trump would be dumb enough to say such things within earshot of others.

  9. Does anyone really care about this, except a coterie of lefty journalists (redundant) convinced that this, this, this is the story, it is! FINALLY…that is going to defeat Trump?

    I use my liberal friends and acquaintances (which are about 90% of my friends and acquaintances) and their social media presence as a barometer. Few have showed interest in this stupid non-story (and, as I’ve mentioned, many will post the most inane progressive tripe imaginable).

    It has all the trappings of what lefty journalists (again, redundant) in their very tightly sealed bubble, are convinced will affect voters in flyover states. Their ignorance is galling. I am fairly confident Trump is going to win, but I might be wrong, of course. However, if he loses, I guarantee this idiot story will have so little to do with the loss it will be immeasurable.

  10. My understanding of the general principle by which the MSM has made its living over the past however many years has been this: at some point, they came to be seen as the quintessential objective source of news and information in society. That general attitude prevailed among the U. S. public for a long time. Then the MSM came to be distrusted as being more and more biased, broadly speaking starting from the 2000 election, though the awareness of this has been slow to percolate into the general public consciousness and has only very recently really gotten a grip. I understand this to be a sort of reversion to an earlier era, when it was taken for granted that the press was opinionated and there were multiple partisan newspapers in a given town, and which paper one habitually read depended on one’s political allegiance, but nobody pretended that there was one paper that spoke “the” truth for everybody.

    But it just occurred to me that while I can sit here and watch the model of a press that had been regarded as fair and objective unravel over these past couple of decades, what I don’t comprehend yet is how the inverse process developed – how the press went from being made up of clearly partisan institutions with, as far as I understand, no plausible claim to general objectivity such as would have been taken for granted by broad swaths of the public to having this reputation for fairness and accuracy and so on. I wasn’t alive during that part of the evolution, you see.

    I think now that it would help to explore how that development came to be. Was the driving force WW II, Eric Sevareid and that sort of thing? Or was it the Great Depression and something about news reporting in that period? Is what’s happened to the MSM lately a kind of reversion to the mean and was the reputation of the press as a trustworthy source of information always a mere veneer? (I rhymed. 🙂 ) There are of course influences that didn’t exist back in the old days, like social media and TV. But is their existence decisive, though, in understanding these historical developments in attitudes within and about the press? I don’t know.

    Bear in mind that in framing my query, I’m not interested so much in the actual truth of how objective the media are or were – for example, whether or not the facts about the Tet offensive were on Cronkite’s side, to use an old instance – but about the perception of the same. And even within that, I would specify the perception on the part of the public as a mass, not the perception of the portion of the public that has always tended to be more knowledgeable or politically engaged.

  11. Mark Felt was using the journalists and they enjoyed it. They are no better than prostitutes. I was in the Navy and Navy regulations require you to be dressed appropriately for the activity in which you are engaged. If journalists were required to follow that rule they would all be dressed as Washington DC street whores.

  12. My son, who is 48 years old, came down from Colorado to join me in Abilene for our annual dove hunt this past weekend. We spent a good deal of our time together discussing current events and our concerns about the election in November. I shared with him my problem is that all media left is the worst but all of them want ‘gotcha headlines’ stirring up emotions and huge gaps in the old newspaper formula presentation of who, what, when, where and why quoting real sources, all of that in a two paragraph lead in and then presenting all of the details so each reader can make a decision based upon verifiable facts, not what the reporter thinks about the situation because those thoughts should be relegated to the editorial pages. Of course the talking heads on the broadcast media and their experts are even worse and anonymous sources are not sources, as you say that’s gossip. When I shared my views with my son he told me that the world we live in today with the way media performs is nothing like what I think it should be, my views of the media are not the reality of today.

    As for Trump saying disparaging things about veterans any one who has watched his actions as president while he has been in office knows that is not who he is. His comments about McCain make sense in context and I think the choice of McCain for president was a poor one and his actions after that election showed some poor, petty decision making. Our friend Palin was picked to run with him and she really brought a lot of energy into his election for a while until her weak spots showed up and McCain and his crew threw her under the bus and never looked back. That is why I dislike the RNC just a little bit less than the DNC.

  13. Anna Timofeeva-Egorova was a Russian WWII attack pilot. In her memoirs, she said that when her mother prayed…”.”kneeling before the icons, as she firstly listed all our names, the names of her children, begging God for health and wisdom for us, and then at the end of each prayer repeating: ‘God save them from slander!’”

    In her childhood, she didn’t understand what ‘slander’ meant and why the request to be saved from it needed to be included in every prayer. After her brother was sent away as an Enemy of the People, she understood.

  14. Sherman was not the only Civil War general who detested the press; George Meade was another. Here is an article titled “At War with the Press,” about the occasion in 1864 when Meade ran a reporter with the unfortunate name of Edward Crapsey out of his camp riding backward on a mule: “A sign saying ‘Libeler of the Press’ was placed around Crapsey’s neck, and the reporter was propped backward on a lop-eared mule and ridden through the camp, his passage heralded by a drum-and-bugle rendition of ‘Rogue’s March.’ According to one private who witnessed the spectacle, Crapsey ‘was howled at, and the wish to tear him limb from limb and strew him over the ground was fiercely expressed’ wherever he went.”

    https://www.historynet.com/at-war-with-the-press.htm

  15. OldTexan at 5:12 pm:
    For some reason I had previously thought the 5 journalism questions skipped “why” and included “how”. Wiki confirmed that “why” is one of the 5, but added some people added “how” as a 6th element. It strikes me that “why” often requires an interpretation of the facts, rather than being part of the facts. If a reporter questions a witness or a participant to an event about the “why” and then reports that response, that is factual reporting (sort of, anyway). But otherwise they must insert their view as to why something occurred or was done. Might still be factual after a fashion, but perhaps not.
    Understanding “how” something was done also seems pretty important to me as part of the news, depending on what is being presented. How did the alleged arsonist start the fire? How did Sherman’s troops take Atlanta? How did Truman come to the decision to drop the Bomb? Etc.

  16. PA Cat – well, if we could get rival networks to film each other’s Libel Ride (hmm very close to Liberal) — everyone’s ratings would go up!

  18. ObloodyHell on September 7, 2020 at 3:49 pm said:
    Never forget the Wayback Machine…
    * * *
    Loved the stories.
    The prediction in the first story that using anonymous sources would end soon (printed in 1994) didn’t pan out, obviously.

    From the second one, in 1998:

    SB: A recent poll revealed that 71 percent of the American public believed the media to be frequently inaccurate in reporting. How can we restore the public’s confidence?

    AN: Instead of being inaccurate, be accurate. You can fix it simply by being both accurate and fair, and I think that has to happen first of all in the classroom. It has to be taught, and then it has to happen in each individual newsroom.

    SB: Is there a way for the American media to get away from the use of confidential sources?

    AN: Sure. Ban ‘em.

    Apparently, no one listened to the answer.
    https://morningconsult.com/2020/04/22/media-credibility-cable-news-poll/

    The share of U.S. adults who said nine leading media outlets — including CBS and The New York Times — were credible has dropped roughly 9 percentage points since December 2016, from 60.6 percent to an average of 51.2 percent today. Last year, the average credibility rating sat at 55.4 percent.

    As was seen in last year’s analysis, Republicans are driving this drop.
    …
    Among Republicans, perceptions of four media outlets have fallen more than 20 points since the last presidential election. In December 2016, at least roughly half of Republicans thought The Wall Street Journal (64 percent), The New York Times (52 percent), CNN (51 percent) and MSNBC (48 percent) were credible. Four years later, those figures now stand at 41 percent for The Journal, 29 percent for the Times and 27 percent for both CNN and MSNBC.

    Gee – what happened in 2016 that could have caused such a decline in trust?

  20. Philip Sells, the media became much more objective starting with WWII. It was a time of unity, that unless you lived through it, you wouldn’t believe. But we were all facing serious enemies and most knew that unity of purpose was needed to win the war. I was a kid, but I remember the sense of every one doing their part. The radios and newspapers tried to be as supportive and factual as they could be. They began to promote themselves as objective purveyors of the news. That all began to unravel during the Korean War – an unpopular war. By the time of Vietnam there were a lot of new journalists and many decided the war was American “imperialism.” Anti-Americanism and partisanship began to be seen in the news more often. . But the media kept claiming to be the objective news sources they had been during the WWII years. It’s a pose they still try to maintain, but I think that most people (at least conservatives and libertarians) now see them as naked partisans.

  21. neo states, “today’s “journalists” are neither skeptics nor cynics. They are leftist true believers, working for a cause: the installation of a permanent leftist elite authority controlling the press, the government, and everything else. They are propagandists, and that should be clear by now to every single American.”

    Oh its clear all right but for those who vote democrat, the end justifies the means. So it doesn’t matter whether Trump actually said anything of the kind. In their minds, he’s a horrible person and standing in the way of a better world, so the ‘truth’ is that any accusation, no matter how bad, can’t measure up to the ‘real’ truth. Liberal or leftist, anyone willing to vote for Biden has literally swallowed the proverbial ‘kool-aid’.

  23. Hmmm.
    If you squint you just might be able to make out a pattern…
    https://dailycaller.com/2020/09/08/the-atlantic-editorial-in-chief-jeffrey-goldberg-anonymous-sourcing-not-good-enough/
    H/T Instapundit

    https://www.outkick.com/washington-post-acknowledges-they-misquoted-me-buries-correction/
    H/T Poweline blog

    (Now just multiply those two unfortunately unremarkable incidents by a coupla’ thousand…. Or should that be tens of thousands? Or more??)

  25. There’s another deeply dislikable aspect to McCain. Prima Donna to the Left and media, then dissed by them when he ran for prez and was smeared by the NYTimes in a phony affaire claim (September 2008).

    McCain could never slam his abusers. He died the poster child of an idiot NeverTrumper who could never be suckered enough for fawning media headlines again and again. He and his strategy goon, Schmidt, still a NeverTrumper who has gone Dem, thankfully,

    McCain did play his base as the War Hero during election time and the party traitor the rest. What a snake.

    McCain died a Symbol, like Traitor Romney, of what we cannot stand any more: establishment RepubloCrats. Time for post-establishment Trump-style Party to replace them.

  26. Perhaps a minor point but the Watergate scandal gave us something else. Virtually every scandal since then has been labeled with the suffix “gate”, including the most recent salon-gate. Is this just a lack of original thinking or is it a lame attempt to link themselves to the supposedly heroic journalists who brought down a president?

  27. Cbyoungblood, both. More the latter than the former, I imagine, but even so. Well, maybe not so much a link to the journalists themselves is sought, but to the old mystique of breaking an earth-shattering story. It may even be that for some versions of “[insert noun here]-gate,” it’s specifically meant to be a tongue-in-cheek reference.

    Imagine if there were a change in the set of dice traditionally used for D&D, for example, and suddenly somebody comes out with a 10-sider that looks different somehow. And the reason this happened, it turns out, was because the maker of the new dice set was mixed up in a shady deal of some kind with someone in Congress, who in turn had sketchy connections to a weird real estate deal with the Gygax estate or something, and then this thing about a Russian tycoon comes into it somehow… would it not be natural to call the whole matter “Dicegate”?

    I wonder if anybody would buy novel with such a plot.

    Don’t anyone steal my idea! {upraised cautionary finger}

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