Media Annual Report Card: Accuracy and Trust - F

Kind of speaks to the performance of the mainstream media for the entire year.

lol. 4th most read op-ed at USA Today in 2019: pic.twitter.com/bbiXrMNpVK

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) December 27, 2019

For twelve months, the mainstream media and Establishment figures have been assuring us that Nunes et al were out of their minds; that there was no Deep State opposition to Trump; that there was no spying on the Trump campaign by the former administration; that the Steele Dossier was substantially true; that there was a high probability that Trump was some sort of Russian agent; that the Mueller Report would provide convincing proof of collusion between Trump and Russia; that the FBI acted with integrity and due diligence; that the FISA courts were a solid wall protecting citizen rights from illegal government intrusion; that the Steele Dossier (payed for by the Democratic National Committee) played no role in justifying spying on the Trump campaign; that the intelligence agencies were scrupulous in their attention to their duties, protocols, and their prohibitions; that there were good grounds for impeaching the president; that there was no Deep State conspiracy; that the experts knew what they were talking about; that Establishment dynastic political families were not deriving money from their political positions.

Twelve months of confident and declarative reporting.

For those of us who read widely from many sources, none of this seemed convincing but there was always the prospect that some aspects of it might be true.

And I still do not believe that there was a Deep State conspiracy. But the distinction between large numbers of Deep State actors independently sharing a common but unstated goal which coincidentally shaped their actions towards a common end versus large numbers of Deep State actors actively and explicitly coordinating with one another to bring down a president and overturn a popular election result becomes more and more fine.

All the rest of the mainstream media claims? Dust in the Wind.

Mueller, Horowitz, and even the House Impeachment proceedings brought all the mainstream media assertions to nought. If the mainstream media was not deliberately lying, they were either self-deluding on a grand scale or simply massively incompetent in their reporting.

As the year closes, we don't have all the answers but the accusatory tide has ebbed uncovering some troubling truths which are indicative of institutional corruption in Federal agencies which needs to be addressed and reveals journalistic practices in the mainstream media which undermine their independence and professionalism (above and beyond the sexual predator ethos which has also been revealed through the year.)

As the dark days of winter close the year, we now know with significant degrees of confidence and documentation that:

The main points made in the Nunes Memo have been substantiated.

There was clearly a wide network of Federal employees deeply committed to the defeat of candidate Trump or the bringing down of the elected president.

There was baseless signal and human agent spying on members of the Trump campaign and therefore on the candidate himself. The former administration was briefed on this spying.

The Steele Dossier has been shown to be an aggregation of rumor and fringe speculation with virtually no evidentiary basis.

Trump has proven, through the arming of the Ukraine and ever-tightening sanctions on Russia, to be perhaps the most active president in constraining Russian ambitions in the past twenty years or more.

The Mueller Report failed to find any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.

The FBI was at best consistently incompetent and more likely criminally corrupt in their political investigations.

The FISA court was never a safeguard against FBI abuse, rubber-stamping requests even after multiple warnings were raised about possible FBI abuse.

The Steele Dossier was the primary and substantially only basis for FBI investigations of the Trump campaign and administration.

We now know (and knew even before this year) that the NSA and CIA played active roles in supporting the FBI in their illegal activities, in addition to conducting their own illegal surveillance activities.

We know from House investigations that the accusations against the president are insubstantial and amount to pique over policy differences. No crimes have been uncovered. There is no imminent danger. There is no bi-partisan support for impeachment but there is bi-partisan support opposing impeachment.

The "experts" called before the House committees have demonstrated small-scale thinking, shown track records of error and failure, and displayed a marked reluctance to perform their duties as required by law and instructed by their supervisors.

The only thing the House investigations brought clarity to is that the political dynasties of Pelosi, Clinton, Obama, Gore, Biden, Warren, Kerry, etc. have all demonstrated extraordinary capacity to convert their political positions into tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of personal wealth. The House has clarified that what is shocking are not the crimes committed. What is shocking is the unethical activities which are legal.

The only thing that the mainstream media has proven this year is that they are not to be trusted. The most recent measures from Gallup are from September. The percentage of people with a Great Deal of confidence in the mainstream media is down to 13% from 14% a year ago. Perhaps even more significantly, the percent of respondents indicating that they had No Trust At All in the mainstream media rose from 24% a year ago to 28% in September.

It appears that the mainstream media got virtually all the political news wrong in 2019. Combine this with the not unrelated changing culture of journalism as document in Journalists Against Free Speech by John Tierney, and combine that with the disappearance of news monopolies, and the news of yet another year of journalist job losses in the thousands and you can't help but conclude that the future of the Fourth Estate is dire and that their bad circumstances are substantially self-created.