Claimed without evidence

From Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Yesterday Spread a Significant Lie All Over Twitter by Glenn Greenwald.

In the past month, desperate for old style factual reporting by classical liberal journalists (i.e. journalists committed to the Age of Enlightenment culture), I have begun subscribing to more and more substack accounts.  Substack being the platform where classical liberal journalists are arriving as they flee the draconian censorship of mainstream media and that collapsing business model.

And how refreshing it is.  Greenwald revisits the MSM lies about the Hunter Biden scandal (and the threat that that story poses to the Biden administration.)  Just before the election, factual information emerged about the breadth and depth of Hunter Biden's financial shenanigans in Ukraine.  As soon as the threat was recognized, mainstream media journalists went into overtime to suppress and censor the story.  Their reporting was all propagandistic assertion and zero factual reporting.  

And now they have done it again.  

Do you see how they behave? Take a look. Prior to the election, out of desperation to ensure that Biden won, they censored and maligned this reporting by mindlessly endorsing an assertion from life-long CIA operatives that never had any evidence: ignore these documents; they are Russian disinformation. They not only invoked that claim to justify ignoring the story but also to successfully agitate for its censorship by Twitter and Facebook. So they spent weeks spreading an utter lie in order to help the candidate that they favored win the election. Remember, these are journalists doing that.

Then, yesterday, the intelligence community issued a report that does not even purport to contain any evidence: just assertions. And they all jumped to treat it as gospel: no questioning of it, no skepticism, no demands to see evidence for it, not even any notation that no evidence was provided. They just instantly enshrined claims from the CIA and NSA as Truth. How can you possibly be a journalist with even minimal knowledge of what these agencies do and look in the mirror as you do this?

But so much worse, in this case, they just outright lied about what the report said — just fabricated assertions that the report did not even allude to, in order to declare their lies from last October to be vindicated. Even if this report had asserted that the Hunter Biden laptop materials were manufactured by the Kremlin, that would prove nothing. Evidence-free assertions from the U.S. intelligence community merit skepticism, not blind faith — especially from people calling themselves journalists.

But the report did not even claim that. And when some of them realized this, they did virtually nothing to rectify the severe disinformation they had spent the day spreading. These are the people who claim to be so profoundly opposed to conspiracy theories and devoted to combating “disinformation”; as usual, they are the ones who spread disinformation most recklessly and frequently.

Read the whole thing.  Glenn Greenwald is well worth subscribing to.