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Home » When is a correction by the MSM not a correction?

When is a correction by the MSM not a correction?

The New Neo Posted on by

When it’s a stealth correction, way after the fact. And that’s the way it’s usually done, if it’s done at all.

They count on the initial story continuing to hold sway in people’s memories.

[NOTE: In a related story, both CNN and MSNBC are experiencing a sharp downturn in ratings now that Trump is gone. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.]

Comments

When is a correction by the MSM not a correction? — 42 Comments

  1. I’m always surprised when they actually do this. Why bother? They obviously don’t care about the truth and the story has had whatever impact it was going to have so why not just leave it alone.

  2. It’s a sad state when Americans have to rely on foreign press to get at least somewhat accurate coverage.

    Daily Mail has become my go to.

  3. Tucker, without question the most interesting as well as the most important personality on cable, is once again at the top of the ratings. but not only is he being increasingly and viciously vilified by the left (e.g. by HBO’s brainless John Oliver, as well as by Brian Stelter, the eunuch at CNN), but he has been shamefully attacked (in unprecedented manner) by the bloated and corrupt Pentagon, increasingly controlled by “woke” ideology under the incompetent new Secretary of Defense (described recently by Biden as “the guy who runs that outfit over there”).

  4. One of the reasons I enjoy coming here is because Neo rarely accepts the initial reporting at face value; most of the rest of the right-blogosphere usually does, though some of them are learning. National Review seems to be the slowest of those who have not actually gone ahead and joined the other side a la Max Boot or Jennifer Rubin.

  5. Here is a good description of the American media:

    “https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american

    Unlike the “reporters” of Pravda and Izvestia who were obligated – or risk death or prison – to print laudatory “news” of the communist Soviet government , the media today in the USA voluntarily and willingly has become a propaganda arm of the govt. and demokrat party.
    This being the case, the USA media , is far more repugnant , execrable and loathsome than those who “reported” for Pravda and Izvestia during Stalin’s rule.

    Unfortunately, about half of all American citizens believes the leftist propaganda coming out of the anus- holes of the media.

  6. What is war’s ultimate end?
    It is, says Clausewitz, “the political object of the war.”

    “The smaller the sacrifice we demand from our opponent, the smaller … will be the means of resistance which he will employ…. Further, the smaller our political object, the less value shall we set upon it, and the more easily shall we be induced to give it up altogether.” – Clausewitz

    “All warfare is based on deception.” Sun Tzu

    “I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. – But the age of chivalry is gone. – that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold the generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.” – Edmund Burke

  7. They lie remorselessly and then they toss out a correction, likewise with no remorse. As if they cared, laughing, snorting and snickering. As if it actually mattered….

    The desired effect was achieved. Mission accomplished! Touche! But oops, so, so sorry….suckerzzzz.

    Since they’ve convinced themselves that they’re lying for a higher cause (the cause of Truth); that they are the good guys (the forces of light; that they are fighting a heroic, never-ending, Manichean battle against Trumpian darkness, Deplorable awfulness…Conservative terrorism.

    And so, the hell with the truth (if the truth backs Trump). The hell with the Constitution (if the Constitution supports Trump). The hell with the country—a country that actually elected that evil clown once (actually twice)…because the most important thing is to rid the country of Trump, crush his evil influence. And if not banish, then entirely emasculate his supporters.

    File under: Akhenaten revisited.

  8. 1 year from today, ask 10 random people about this story.

    I guarantee that 7 of them, at the very least, will know the original story, and not the correction, and will believe the original story to be true.

  9. Chris of Rights:

    The MSM is well aware of that. That’s why they print so much garbage. The propaganda value is vast and the risks negligible.

  10. @neo:The propaganda value is vast and the risks negligible.

    I think it’s more like hyperinflation. Increasingly devaluing the news currency continues to offer marginal benefit with respect to not doing it until eventually everyone accepts that it is worthless and starts relying on something else. It takes for that substitute to emerge. Once it gets going, reality eventually puts a stop to it, but a lot gets trashed in the meantime.

  11. Frederick:

    95% of the people I know rely utterly on the MSM or sources even further to the left.

  12. Where the pathetically laughable meets the inevitable….

    “Critics rip AP article blaming Republicans for Cuomo’s mounting scandals”
    https://justthenews.com/government/state-houses/breathtaking-bulls-critics-rip-ap-article-blaming-republicans-cuomos

    Not sure I see the problem here, since the AP is just doing what it has been trained to do, conditioned to do, with a great deal of positive reinforcement thrown at them—reaping tremendous rewards.

    (It’s also possible that they don’t even bother to read what they write…or maybe it’s all computer generated, with the dial set to “Screw Trump”…)

  13. The Sovietization of the American Press
    The transformation from phony “objectivity” to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement
    https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american

    No, you’re not imagining the media’s Pravda-ization
    By Andrea Widburg

    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/no_youre_not_imagining_the_medias_pravdaization.html

    Look back and see that so long ago, this was what i said would happen among many other things… you dont want to know what i see now in the future…

  15. Ace highlighted a comment over at his site

    http://ace.mu.nu/

    The commenter pointed out that not only is cable news down, so were the Golden Globes, the Grammys, sports, basically everything. The commenter wisely observed that if the audience is just going online or to streaming, the Media Industrial Complex will be able to adjust. But what if they’re just…going? You know, to read a book or take a walk or work in their garden?

    For the last few decades, the mass market audience has been splintering into smaller and smaller niches but still growing overall. If they overall audience is actually shrinking…boom goes the dynamite.

    Mike

  16. Artfldgr:

    And I noticed it almost 20 years ago, before I ever started blogging. It’s one of the things I describe at some length in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series – the ubiquity of the lies the MSM tells, and how they uniformly benefit the left.

    I made the analogy to Pravda back in 2009 and many times after that. The following is from that 2009 post; I’m referring to a Newsweek article:

    Pravda could not have done any better in its bad old days as an organ for the USSR. But the journalists [sic] who wrote for it at least had an excuse of sorts: they lived in a totalitarian society and they were writing for the only game in town—except for equally-compromised Izvetzia, that is.

  17. “the ubiquity of the lies the MSM tells, and how they uniformly benefit the left.”

    Remember, it’s only in the short run. In the long run, it winds up leaving the Left disconnected from reality. Like when they thought Hillary Clinton would be a shoe-in in 2016 and when they loved the idea of Trump winning the GOP nomination.

    I had an online interaction with someone who said they were from Florida and the state had done a terrible job dealing with COVID. I pointed out the fact that Florida has actually done as good or better job than most states. It didn’t matter. The person JUST KNEW Florida was bad because that’s what the media said. The kicker, of course, is that person will wind up voting for legitimately terrible Democratic candidates that will either lose or lead Florida into real disaster.

    Mike

  18. Related (in a kind of oh-and-by-the-way way):

    Russiahoaxers Anonymous 12-step program will not soon be instituted at WAPO since WAPO (and its media feeding-frenzy friends), given their penchant for telling nothing but lies, will ALWAYS need deniable plausibility:
    https://twitter.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1371548200792899588

    Reuse, Recycle, Reduce, Repurpose, Regurgitate (at the impeachment circus):
    https://twitter.com/joelpollak/status/1371524064079187970

    Rose Mary Woods redux (Trashfoldergate?):
    https://twitter.com/DavidShafer/status/1371531925135953931
    H/T Ron Coleman twitter feed (x3).

  19. I pointed out the fact that Florida has actually done as good or better job than most states. It didn’t matter. The person JUST KNEW Florida was bad because that’s what the media said.

    We’re learning that someone like Glenn Greenwald who has actual fixed criteria to evaluate social phenomena is now atypical among the chattering classes.

    I’ve got a first degree relative who takes what she sees on network news hook line and sinker. I have another partisan Democrat in my social circle. She doesn’t pay attention to network news. However, you can show her the data from Worldometers and other sites, and it has very little effect on her thinking. Imagine pushing a gyrosope. She returns to her equilibrium in short order. Her reaction to Trump was an exercise in emotional processing. I have another 1st degree relative who fancied the harassment of Gen. Flynn was hunky dory because he ‘lied’. These people don’t have any excuses. All three have graduate degrees, one has a research degree, and one has a Phi Beta Kappa key. They have six degrees between them, all from research universities which US News tells me are the bee’s knees. None of these people are Millennials, either. They were all born between 1953 and 1964.

  22. neo asks, “When is a correction by the MSM not a correction?”

    As we all know, whenever the ‘correction’ threatens the narrative.

    Painful consequence is the necessary incentive for abandonment of deceit.

    Since the MSM rejects reasoned persuasion, all that remains is persuasion by other means. The residents of the institutions that are working to destroy America are extremely vulnerable to consequence by ‘other’ means. Destroy the rule of law, reap the whirlwind.

    MBunge,

    “Remember, it’s only in the short run. In the long run, it winds up leaving the Left disconnected from reality.”

    The Left has always been disconnected from reality. Clearly it has not affected their persuasiveness and growth. History demonstrates that until a society divorced from reality collapses, the left’s ‘run’ continues, with only an occasional bump in the road.

    “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” R.A. Heinlein

  23. So, the new story should be about how Georgia Secretary of State flat out lied to the Press. In the old days, the Press got really upset when they discovered that they had been lied to and made a big deal about it. Today… as long as the lie serves the “narrative”… meh.

  24. “The Left has always been disconnected from reality.”

    You’re confusing being WRONG with being delusional. Go watch “Reds” with Warren Beatty. The people who believed in communism in the 1920s were wrong but they weren’t insane. The people who believe in communism now aren’t just wrong and they’re not just delusional. They’re also really really shallow and dumb.

    Mike

  25. Tear gas is just an idea made up of molecules that are explained by chemistry, math, and physics. All imaginary constructs of the white supremacist colonizer state. Ideas are violence or something.

  27. This is small potatoes. You do realize that the media has been creating phony “cops-kill-thousands-of-innocent-minorities” stories for years now, and doing it intentionally to get Americans hating and killing each other, right?

    There are some scores that are way overdue to be settled with the media that are bigger than just about hurting a politician. They are about treason.

  28. On, the other hand, there’s been so many lies, slanders and blood libels foisted against Donald J. Trump, that’ it’s become kind of like a sport. A liberal hobby. A pastime.
    (But one should never forget that these are good people. Really.)

    So what difference does just another liberal blood libel make?
    After all liberals have to have their fun, too.

    Besides we’re talking about the Bezos-owned Bozo news outlet (and its gloriously compromised credibility), which we now know has been the “victim” of a terrible, no-good, lousy “source”. Terribly victimized, in fact, the poor dears. (Can there be anything worse than being victimized by an unscrupulous source?)

    But given the credibility in general of this poor, victimized Bozo mediocrity (worse, actually, than mediocre), why oughtn’t one conclude that the likelihood is, that there was NO SOURCE at all; that is, why shouldn’t someone—like Occam, say—conclude that the whole shebang was fabricated from whole cloth?

    (I mean one DOES HAVE TO keep up with Sulzbergers….)

    Related:
    Example 64,000 of The old advocating-for-election-integrity-is-reallytruly-denying-people-their-voting-rights trick (which has become a Democratic Party staple and will soon be enshrined—by the lawless—as “the law of the land”)!!:
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/georgia-lawmaker-quits-as-county-attorney-over-his-support-for-election-integrity-bill_3733635.html

    Only to be expected from Bezos’ Bozo newspaper.

  29. My late wife and I cancelled paper subscriptions decades ago and I’ve since dumped cable and digital TV. No point in paying for the propaganda.

    Friends and I have joked about the “screamer” websites that we visit to get a clue of what to search for. The Lame Stream Demokrat Media usually maintains silence about the “interesting” material. They suppressed any mention of Pedo-Joe’s son Hunter “doing” his 14 year old neice and his sister-in-law. What a Family! “Willy’s Ho” fits right in. I wonder how long it will take until we find out the identity of the “Nancy-Boy” who murdered Ashli. Not that it matters, since he will have been promoted to a nice, high-paying supervisor’s Super-Grade slot. Nancy and Chuckie need reliable “button-men”.

    Is it true that all the FIBies will have ID and badges that start out with “00”, as in “License To Kill”? If that would be true, we’d never hear about it from the Demokratic Press. Just a surge in suspects “resisting arrest”. {Wink! Wink!}

  30. And so here we are, groping for truth (which is really so elusive, so complicated, so confusing)…as the comedic, even giggly, Jen Psaki fine tunes her stand-up routine! (Indeed, she’s proving to be “a natural”—intuitive and a quick learner—one of “Biden”‘s most successful picks)!
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-finds-cuomo-sexual-misconduct-allegations-troubling-hard-to-read-white-house_3734445.html
    Gropers gotta grope…
    File under: Everyone—but everyone!—deserves the benefit of the doubt. (“Things” are complicated; people are so “hard to read”…)

  31. The reporter did not hear the audio before reporting the story. Instead the claims from one source – given anonymity – were relied on.

    It was always just second hand gossip. From someone with an anti-Trump agenda.

    I’d note that Marty Baron ran a solid newspaper when he was in Florida. After he moved to DC and Bezos bought Wapoo, he seems to have forgotten how to run a real newspaper. Odd.

  32. “…forgotten how to…”
    Money and/or righteous ideological motivation have a tendency to do that…

    But everything can be fixed, I’m sure, if only the WAPO would hire a “fact checker”…!

    (Except, of course, that everything is just splendid already….)

    Anyway, here’s an interesting thread…that includes some mindboggling “outside-the-box” “thinking” whereby Republicans are blamed for “allowing” the election to be stolen.
    https://twitter.com/nuency25/status/1371587247875764233

    (Gosh, who knew that Republicans could be so, um, creative..)

  34. This will not be fixed until the Sullivan doctrine is re-examined. This is allowing the media to fabricate stories or develop narratives like the one Mark Judge went through with Kavanaugh. I have the post saved as a reference item. For those who have not, read the entire posting series.

    https://stream.org/i-knew-the-name-of-the-dragon/

    Just like the Post article, it was an organized political hit job and they will continue to do it over and over until stopped.

  35. I wonder what percentage of media stories based upon “anonymous sources,” were simply invented out of thin air by the article’s writer.

    A look at history suggests that a propagandist media only topples when the tyrannical govt. it supports ceases to exist via peaceful means (a rare event) or a violent overthrow of the govt. (more likely).

    “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
    Mark Twain, (attributed).

  36. To quote an opossum paraphrasing Oliver Hazard Perry: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

    When I read a news story and it has the words, “anonymous source(s)” I stop reading. It used to be a phrase one would find in the National Enquirer*, not the Washington Post. A literate people should know better. They (a.k.a. “we”) do not; or, perhaps worse, we do not care.

    *Although the National Enquirer did break the Monica Lewinsky story.

  37. @JohnTyler:I wonder what percentage of media stories based upon “anonymous sources,” were simply invented out of thin air by the article’s writer.

    I think it’s close to zero. Invented out of the thin air by the article’s sources, who have an ax to grind and know that the reporter is credulous and friendly? Maybe 50%, and the other 50% being highly tendentious renderings devoid of context.

  38. I just saw US NEWS’ site, today.
    (US News is a newspaper-thing that usually favors the Democrats.)

    They had a cartoon about Donald Trump [fictitiously] talking to North Korea’s leader.

    It’s amazing:

    Most DEmocrats + their reporter friends said for years- “get TRUMP out of here! We never want to hear about him AGAIN!”,

    …but then they STILL talk about him, every day.

    …Isn’t that strange?

    He’s gone, he’s not in the govt. anymore, but- they still say, “it’s all his fault”.

    Are they working on the problems, or are they complaining all the time?

    Excuses, excuses.

  39. And for some people, even the corrections don’t matter.

    Glenn Greenwald on Twitter brought up the blatant lie about Officer Sicknick’s death. He got a bunch of people in his replies who not only didn’t care that they were lied to, but they completely and utterly believe without question the new “official” version of events. And remember, every single person who replied that way thinks THEY are the smart ones.

    Mike

  40. And then there’s this:
    https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dhs-secretary-predicts-migrant-surge-will-break-20-year-record-blames-trump-policies/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=23228960

    Malevolence is the name of the game in the “Biden” administration. Pure, unadulterated malevolence.

    Keeping in mind that just as everything was “all Bush’s fault” in Obama’s first incarnation. This “enlightened” policy will continue in the “Biden” administration. Moreover, just as it was not wise to believe anything Obama spouted, it would be absolutely idiotic to believe a word “Biden” says.
    (Remember: “Unity” means what “Biden” wants it to mean.)
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/its-trumps-fault/

  42. Rufus,
    The National Enquirer also broke the John Edwards illegitimate baby story, IIRCC.
    Their batting average is way higher than the WaPoop.

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