On media lies
Commenter “steve walsh” writes the following about the press, on the Sicknick medical examiner thread:
Not only do they never suffer any consequences for telling their lies, they actually benefit from doing so. Thus lying has become a useful and common tactic.
Yes, there’s really no downside to it as far as the MSM is concerned. Now that they are activists who place party and politics above any journalistic integrity, lying becomes standard and very widespread. The fact that they back each other up in presenting a united front when they promulgate a lie is a very important part of it. Except for rogue reporters like Greenwald and a few others, the agreed-on story is told early and repeated often. After all, they’re just quoting each other – and they’re reliable sources, right? For the Sicknick fire extinguisher story, the initial disseminator was the NY Times, supposedly quoting two nameless officials. There was no other source, and yet the story spread far and wide and was assumed by most people (including many on the right) to be the truth.
It was not. It was a complete lie. And the facts that challenged it were out there from the start, and yet they were widely ignored except for rogue reporters such as Glenn Greenwald. As for Greenwald and the other rare reporters who actually are willing to question the accepted narrative and do some digging, the rest of the press gets together and accuses them of being racists and white supremacists and other such things. Once they’re been labeled that way, the public “learns” that there’s no reason to pay attention to the Greenwalds of the world.
How many times have you heard from Democrat friends, if you try to cite something from a Fox contributor such as Tucker Carlson for example, that it’s Faux News and it should be ignored because of course it’s a lie? They don’t need to see it or hear it; they simply know they can dismiss it.
And that’s what the MSM relies on. And when their stories are finally revealed to be false, they just move on to the next one. If Trump called them “fake news,” that means of course that they are truth-tellers – because we all know that Trump’s a liar, right? It still works that way for a lot of people.
Another topic that came up in the Sicknick medical examiner thread was the role of the Sicknick family. Some people are wondering why they didn’t speak up – or why they didn’t speak up more. They did speak up, but for the most part the MSM in the US would not give them the time of day, because they were contradicting the agreed-on narrative. I’m not so sure the family could have done more; I certainly saw their statements early on, but they were in places like – you guessed it – the British papers.
This phenomenon of the British papers tending to be much better than ours about reporting our news is one I’m remarked on before. It’s pretty consistent, and although I’m sure they’re not infallible, I can’t recall their having to retract anywhere near the number of stories that the US MSM gets wrong (or lies about) on a regular basis.
For example, regarding the Sicknick family and the press, please see this post I wrote on February 26. That’s about two months ago. I’ll finish up my post today by repeating the text of that February post of mine. Here it is:
Here’s a recent interview with Officer Sicknick’s mother. Note that it’s in the British paper The Daily Mail. It’s not unusual for British papers to cover events in the US more thoroughly than our own MSM, and to publish things the left wouldn’t be enthusiastic about here:
The mother of the US Capitol police officer who died following the riot on January 6 believes that her son succumbed to a fatal stroke – that he was not bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher as reported.
Yet more than one month after Officer Brian Sicknick’s death on January 7, she has admitted that they are still in the dark as to what exactly caused that catastrophic episode.
Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com Gladys Sicknick, 74, was unequivocal in her assertion that Officer Brian Sicknick was not struck on the head and that as far as the family knows her son had a fatal stroke.
She said, ‘He wasn’t hit on the head no. We think he had a stroke, but we don’t know anything for sure.
‘We’d love to know what happened.’
Please let that sink in: apparently the family has not been told the results of any autopsy. Has there been an autopsy prior to Officer Sicknick’s cremation? I have never read anything that indicates an answer to that question.
More:
But in the six weeks since his death the truth has taken a backseat to the myth of the brutal attack. Democratic Impeachment Managers even brazenly cited the incident – that he was stricken in the head by a fire extinguisher – as fact in pre-trial articles filed February 2 despite already growing doubts.
Now DailyMail.com has unpacked fact from fiction in an attempt to extract Sicknick’s death from the misinformation in which it was mired before it even happened.
Please read the whole thing. You probably know most of it, because it’s been covered on this blog several times since January, but here’s an excerpt:
…January 8, Sicknick’s father, Charles, 81, told Reuters that on January 7, as they rushed from their homes in New Jersey to DC, the family were told that Sicknick had a blood clot on his brain and had suffered a stroke. He was being kept alive on a ventilator but was dead by the time they got there.
Yet these few publicly available facts were bulldozed over by political fervor and it was the unattributed account of a brutal attack, also reported by the Associated Press, that gained traction.
Less than 24 hours after his death, with no autopsy, no confirmation of any sign of blunt trauma, no investigation nor due process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the ‘perpetrators’ of Sicknick’s ‘attack’ to be brought to justice and vowed, ‘We will not forget.’
Despite the family’s earnest desire to the contrary, Sicknick’s death was politicized and seized on as an exemplar of all of the savagery of the pro-Trump mob’s assault on the temple of American democracy.
There’s a helpful timeline at the article, too.
The following is true of most press and pundits on both left and right, who for the most part swallowed the fire extinguisher story without checking it out or paying attention to the family’s statements of what medical authorities had told them:
…[T]he narrative continued to run unchecked with not one leader acknowledging the ongoing investigation or the complete absence of any certainty amid the melee of misreporting…
On February 2 CNN reported that investigators were ‘vexed’ by the lack of evidence linking anyone with Sicknick’s death. According to their source medical examiners had found no sign of blunt trauma.
Yet that very day Democratic Impeachment Managers filed their pre-trial articles in which they ignored all doubts and evidence to the contrary and stated as fact, ‘The insurgents killed a Capitol police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.’
The left is now trying to work the pepper spray angle – the idea that pepper spray wielded by some of the rioters might have caused his death. In very rare cases it can cause a spike in blood pressure – perhaps that’s what happened to Officer Sicknick, although the blood clot story doesn’t seem to support that. At any rate, we’ve not heard anything about Officer Sicknick’s blood pressure when arriving at the hospital.
The Daily Mail article also mentions that pepper spray was used on January by both police and the rioters, so it would be next to impossible to say who wielded the spray that got Sicknick, and of course it was certainly a delayed reaction on his part if he had a reaction to it at all, because there were many hours between the demonstration and his collapse and in the meantime he reported feeling fine. Unless a video is found of someone spraying him directly, it may always remain up in the air, but the left is clinging to it as a possible way to continue to blame the rioters.
_________________________________________________________
That’s the end of my Frebruary 26 post. Yesterday the medical examiner also stated that bear spray did not kill Officer Sicknick.
I wonder – if you were to take a poll of your Democrat friends and ask them how Officer Sicknick died, would they continue to think it was a fire extinguisher or bear spray?
If the media lies, is mondale dead or not? 🙂
I suppose the MSM’s view of the news consumer ought to be considered an insult. But since they’re right about a fair chunk of folks….and they don’t care what the rest of us think or know….is it really an insult?
The left is now trying to work the pepper spray angle – the idea that pepper spray wielded by some of the rioters might have caused his death. In very rare cases it can cause a spike in blood pressure
I’ve seen videos of the “bear spray” incident. The individuals accused were as much as ten feet away from the officer. There is no evidence in those videos (There are two of them) of any reaction by the officer or of the spray having reached that far. It is not even clear who was doing the spraying.
The ME’s statement suggests there was an autopsy but no explanation of why it has been concealed for so long.
Artflgr:
I can’t say I even knew that he was still alive. I wonder what he thought about the present Democrat Party.
Neo:
funny typo: moist people
These days, I take my laughs where I can find them, but you might prefer the standard spelling.
Mike K:
They say it was delayed because they were interviewing people and reviewing videos.
But of course that has little to nothing to do with an autopsy. Unless they were trying to mount a Chauvin-like case in which they used videos to “inform” the results of the autopsy.
They have charged the pepper sprayers with some type of assault, I believe.
Cornflour:
Good catch, will fix.
Off topic, but I just saw that the verdict is in on the Derek Chauvin trial and will be announced at 4:30.
I watched Briana Keilor on the CNN AM show today. She was just ranting and lying about Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity. Totally bizarre. But the CNN viewers eat it up and demand it.
The lying is really extraordinary. And, of course, CNN was all in for a conviction for Chauvin. John Berman, the other CNN morning person, is totally unhinged.
The medical examiner has already scotched the idea that Ofc. Sicknick had an allergic reaction to bear spray. “No evidence” of that.
A day or two after the rally, heard on news radio Sicknick died of natural causes and it was a Brain aneurysm, only after a day or two later did the lie he died from a fire extinguisher started being reported.
“I wonder – if you were to take a poll of your Democrat friends and ask them how Officer Sicknick died, would they continue to think it was a fire extinguisher or bear spray?”
Yes. Absolutely. Every single one of them. They also believe the 2020 election was the fairest and most transparent in history, but the 2016 election was ‘hacked by Russia’. They believe everything peddled in the ‘Russia Collusion’ hoax, that huge numbers of unarmed black men are routinely murdered by white supremacist cops, that the riot on January 6 was a massive, horribly violent insurrection unlike anything seen since the Civil War, but that the BLM-Antifa riots either did not happen, were ‘mostly peaceful’ or were justifiable outrage and ‘punching up’, that the Covid-19 pandemic is as deadly and dangerous as the Spanish flu (maybe more so!), that SCIENCE!(tm) justifies, without question, every single restrictive measure taken in response to the pandemic, that Anthony Fauci is a saint and a genius, that illegal immigrants (sorry, ‘undocumented refugees’) are just as American as you or I, and a tremendous benefit to our economy and society as a whole, that strict gun control laws would end (or greatly reduce) mass shootings and the murder rate overall, that we could easily fund the ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘Medicare for all’s if ‘the rich’, ‘the 1%’ would just ‘pay their fair share’….
And on, and on, and on….
The left’s democrat politicians, mass media propagandists, ‘educators’ and lawyers… motivated by egotism, opportunism and ideological fanaticism are in the vanguard of those working to impose what at base, amounts to thought crimes.
No greater tyranny can exist.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” ? C. S. Lewis
They are courting a terrible reckoning.
Media lying is like debasing currency; it provides a short-term benefit for as long as people don’t catch on, since the value people place on it is formed by their long habit of being able to trust in the value.
As they start to catch on, to get the same benefit you have to do proportionally more of it, so it tends to accelerate in proportion to how poorly it is working.
@Frederick:
Problem with Media is that 80% of population (please fact check, Art-Deco) are normie sheep and will end up believing anything which is repeated often enough.
People fear mass pile-on of opprobrium. I’ve seen it done in China/HK and we both see it done increasingly in the West. It absolutely works as a technique.
Of the other 20% intelligent enough and ornery enough to think for themselves, more than half are Havel’s Greengrocer. Very few people will actually stick their necks out or get involved in an underground struggle.
Now I’m no expert on this kind of thing, but might it not be expedient to put the Fear of God into the persons of media commentators? How best done, I couldn’t possibly say. IMHO also best to start with Conservative Inc.: Traitors are worse than Declared Enemies.
Solving the lies is simple. Revisit and revise the Sullivan Doctrine. Note James O’Keefe is suing The NYT now Twitter in New York STATE COURT not Federal Court where the Sullivan Doctrine holds sway. He is in discovery for his SUCCESSFUL continuance of his NYT lawsuit and I am sure he will on the second with Twitter. He found a mechanism to use against the information cabal. Additionally I bet that it is a lot less expensive to sue in State Court.
The conservatives got lazy and intimidated by having the Sullivan Doctrine being applied in ever expansive ways. Justice Thomas laid out the legal roadmap to have it revisited. Trump lost a major chance to change the narrative when he failed to force NBC to recant their falsely edit Charlottesville video. Then again when Biden used it to claim that is why he got into the race. Opportunities lost.
So when it comes to the information cabal don’t support them. If they come to interview you pull out your camera and record them. Get the supporting personnel too. Ask them for their names. Accuse them of being liars and lapdogs to a false narrative. Local ones too. They are out to make a name for themselves so they can go national. Witness how a local reporter knocked on the door of an EMT in UTAH that contributed $10 to Kyle Rittenhouse defense fund. (That data breach was intentional as Sundance has noted. Also note the American Thinker article at the end on how Biden’s maladministration is weaponizing the intelligence agencies against us.) I have some dog biscuits in my car and house I intend to hand to them and call them out as poodles. I will ask them to do tricks too.
Post the interaction to any site that will have use it. If Twitter/Facebook takes it down all the better because that causes the weight of evidence grows for any legal action by heavyweights. Make a complaint to the station/copy room and the FCC of harassment or false reporting. Get it on the record. Costs you nothing to do so.
These guys are bullies and once you start showing resistance they tend to back down. Get their faces and their names and post them. If you know their home addresses post that too.
Publicity, scorn and derision. In their sense of exalted status they will not handle it well. The Tea Party initially was passing out tea bags to politicians. Maybe passing out dog biscuits will do the same.
Again solving the problem is simple. It will hard effort but it can be done.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/executive_order_canceling_the_constitution.html
“In contrast, Biden’s new EO is directed mostly at US persons. It criminalizes speech and political activities, based on whimsical and arbitrary definitions. The Biden administration can define “malicious activities,” “democratic processes or institutions,” and the activities that undermine them as it wants.”
Someone else likes my idea too.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/04/hackers-reveal-donors-to-kyle-rittenhouse-defense-fund-media-starts-knocking-on-donors-doors/
“ABC4 Utah investigative reporter Jason Nguyen was really proud of his “report” trying to track down the paramedic who donated $10 last summer to Rittenhouse’s defense fund. In a since-deleted tweet promoting his story, he talked about how he merely wanted paramedic Craig Shepherd’s “side of things”:
Read the whole article. Remember the locals are trying to break nationally.
I continue to be amazed – or, maybe not – at the dearth of observations on timing. Remember all the key Trump hoaxes used to cripple his administration and front-run 2 impeachments? Democratic Congressmen would continually sit in closed-door committee meetings, where the truth was outed, and then dispatch themselves to the microphones to commence lying about it, to damage Trump.
The lies would be broadcast as truth via the compliant LMSM. The Congressmen knew they were lying at the time they pronounced their ‘speculations’, even providing qualifiers such as ‘I’ve seen the evidence’
They were cleverly hiding behind the strictures of Classified Information. There’s a penalty for disclosing it, but no penalty for lying about what it might be.
The Sicknick Story is exactly the same. When did they know the cause of death? I would wager it was as soon as the autopsy was completed. It is a measure of depravity that they kept the information from the family until now, so that they could build the lie more efficiently and effectively.
Spartacus – very good ideas, but I don’t like doxxing even the other side.
You might add asking them, “Are you from Isvestia or Pravda?”