A follow-up to yesterday's post, the themes of which I've been thinking about quite a lot in the last few weeks, for obvious reasons. In short, as I've been saying frequently, our elite societal arbiters of 'truth' are too often proven wrong by subsequent events and evidence -- raising questions about whether they're incapable of accounting for blindspots, or worse, just attempting to impose their own political and ideological preferences as 'facts' while disqualifying differing viewpoints. My suspicion is that it's a combination of both phenomena, each of which undermines public faith in 'fact checkers' and 'experts.' They lack public faith because they have squandered public faith, repeatedly. I made this point at some length on-air:
On the lab leak theory, “misinformation/conspiracy theories,” and our self-appointed guardians of truth: pic.twitter.com/Wk0rxSP9ke
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) February 27, 2023
It's the media, yes, but also the 'Science' crowd, including you-know-who:
Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 26, 2023
Part of the problem is the media's citation of "experts" who have spotty records for accuracy in some cases, or who are hysterical partisans in others. Consider, for instance, how often news outlets launder journalists' collective leftist worldview through supposed authorities who agree with them. And yes, before we go any further, the group ideology of the journo class can be broadly categorized as leftist:
If we use Twitter Networks to gauge politics, then a large number of journalists are to the Left of @BernieSanders.https://t.co/mxjNN3D7Tv pic.twitter.com/yU0uHpdmLI
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) February 26, 2023
Here's one "expert" the press loves to quote:
Doesn't this get tiring and embarrassing?
— AG (@AGHamilton29) February 27, 2023
Newsweek, MSNBC etc. keep citing the same "expert" to refer to Republicans as fascists every few months despite her clearly having no idea what the term means. pic.twitter.com/OjKs13RcaD
And here's a representative example of her 'expertise' at work:
Ron DeSantis will destroy our democracy with deadly precision. I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous he is. https://t.co/EueotiR4aL
— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) February 26, 2023
Trump is an unique threat to the republic, you see -- but DeSantis is actually even more "dangerous," of course, due to the "deadly precision" with which he'll "destroy our democracy." This type of hyperventilation might be typical of a deeply deranged, foaming-at-the-mouth former cable news host, but this woman is passed off as some sort of neutral expert. Her predictable, hyperbolic partisanship is cringeworthy, but it's especially embarrassing for any journalist who prints her assessments as if they're anything other than unhinged internet comments section fodder. But that's how this racket works: The journos try to bestow credibility upon non-credible actors by labeling them as experts, whose views just so happen to align with their own. Then we have 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' watchdogs who blithely offer declarations like this:
She blocked me, so here is the screenshot. pic.twitter.com/ekTlLdn4lV
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) February 27, 2023
This person accused Tom Cotton of being akin to Soviet propagandists lying about AIDS, even though Cotton has been vindicated. When she got called out for being egregiously unfair and wrong, she blocked the people pointing out her track record. This is the same individual, by the way:
The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum insisted the ongoing Hunter Biden laptop saga didn’t interest her because she didn't see how his "business relationships have anything to do with who should be president," but the liberal writer had no issues with the importance of Donald Trump Jr.’s affairs. "My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think, totally irrelevant. I me"an, it’s not whether it’s disinformation," Applebaum said during a "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy" conference this past week at the University of Chicago, when she was asked about the media's refusal to cover the laptop story when it first broke in 2020. "I mean, I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it to be interesting," she continued. "I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story." ...While the liberal writer declared the Hunter Biden saga fails to interest her, she was more-than-willing to discuss the previous president’s son.
She didn't find Hunter Biden's foreign business entanglements, which allegedly involved his father (despite his father's alleged lies on the subject), to be "interesting" or "relevant," and therefore the issue was not a major news story, in her estimation. But she was highly invested in Donald Trump, Jr.'s meeting with a Russian woman, for instance (remember this detail?), in relation to the debunked "collusion" narrative, which was pushed extremely hard by the media for years. Members of the press who bear-hugged the false 'Russian collusion' story also embraced the 'Russian disinformation' claims about Hunter Biden's laptop, from yet more "experts," who also turned out to be dead wrong -- but not before quite a lot of election-meddling censorship took place. And when challenged on it after the whole affair unraveled, they continued with their sneering and gaslighting and revisionism. These are the same people who wring their hands about "conspiracy theories" and "misinformation" in our politics, entirely unwilling to even fleetingly acknowledge their own infamous contributions to the problems they lament.
I'll leave you with the Washington Post editorial board echoing a bogus, belated, partisan Biden/Buttigieg attack line regarding the East Palestine train derailment, which had been swatted down by careful reporting from National Review, as well as the assessment of an actual expert within Biden's own executive bureaucracy:
WaPo editorial is sticking with blaming Trump, even though Biden's NTSB director said that the Obama ECP rule would not have applied to this particular train because of its type.
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) February 26, 2023
🤷♂️ https://t.co/6EvQ6binhi
Perhaps the Washington Post's editors should check in with their own newspaper's in-house fact-checker:
.@GlennKesslerWP looked at whether the regulations Trump rolled back might have played any role in East Palestine.
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) February 27, 2023
The verdict: There's no evidence at this point they did.https://t.co/CZ5mPkiz5Q
The White House and the Transportation Secretary invented a nonsense excuse to try to blame their own poor response to a disaster on the previous administration. It took them days to settle on the lie. And a major newspaper's editors ran with the lie, even though their 'fact checker' colleagues came to a different, actually fact-based, conclusion. Slow clap. Say, are WaPo's editors among those who bleat plaintively about "misinformation"? Of course they are. I'll leave you with this. It never ends:
America, here's @CBSMMiller lying to your face on @CBS with zero accountability from her cohosts or the network. No book in Florida is "banned statewide," and no book would be permissibly removed from a classroom for "having a black character."
— Bryan Griffin (@BryanDGriffin) February 25, 2023
They want you to be misinformed. https://t.co/PF9IMN5WFk
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