There is something fundamentally amiss

The role of Mainstream Media as bad faith actors seeking to undermine the US seems to take on increasing substance as they continue in their perverse ways.  This week, there were breaking revelations on a scandal from January in which multiple media sources with multiple source verifications reported a call from then President Trump to the Georgia Secretary of State with direct quotations of Trump instructing that the lead election fraud investigator should "find the fraud" and other similar statements; seemingly instructing her to break the law.  

Much reporting of the phone call and the confirmed quotes.  Many allegations of Trump illegality.  Many claims of authoritarian usurpation of the democratic process.  Many confirmations from sources.

All very concerning.  If it happened.  Which it did not.  The Washington Post published a stunning correction this week.  

Click to enlarge.

This isn't "we made a mistake" sort of stuff.  This is "we made the whole thing up" territory.

This tweet was among the first to break the news of the correction.  Follow the thread.

😬
"Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so."https://t.co/PnQm0aJyOu pic.twitter.com/GEzAJmhWDY

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) March 15, 2021

One of the striking things in these instances of mass Mainstream Media fraud is how multiple MSM companies each verify the original story with anonymous confirmations from their own sources.

Someone compiled a list (which I have regrettably lost track of) noting perhaps a dozen news outlets asserting that they had independently confirmed the original Washington Post story.  The usual suspects: CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, NYT, NPR, etc.  

This happens all the time.  As Glenn Greenwald reports in How Do Big Media Outlets So Often "Independently Confirm" Each Other's Falsehoods?, this is well traveled territory.  The Russia-Trump Conspiracy story was a fraud from start to finish but for three or four years, major media companies kept confirming its legitimacy with their own independent reporting and own independent sources.  Until Mueller confirmed it was a pack of lies from top to bottom.

Greenwald also mentions his reporting on Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, claimed for two months to have been killed in the violent armed insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.  The circumstances of Officer Sicknick's death should be readily confirmable.  For two months most MSM media outlets have claimed from multiple sources that he died at the hands of rioters wielding a fire extinguisher.  His family and other official reports say otherwise.  

The mystery here is the inverse of that of Holmes's dog that didn't bark.  

Here we have the opposite situation.  We have packs of dogs all baying the same claims with multiple outlets independently confirming the same story from multiple supposedly independent sources: a story which ends up being demonstrated to not have happened in the first place.

Are all the MSM agreeing to just lie together?  Perhaps they are all confirming but from exactly the same single source?  Perhaps a big story simply attracts increasingly pathological personalities who confirm and can be deemed credible if you don't look too closely at them?

That seemingly is what happened with the Kavanaugh hearings.  The original claim was a bombshell and out of a lifetime's demonstrated character but it had a patina of plausibility.  A claim which was theoretically possible but seemingly highly improbable.  As the hearings continued, key witnesses who were brought forward refused to confirm the story.  Further, more and more allegations were made by fringe individuals wanting to pile on but whose bases for evidence were dramatically weaker than the first claimant and often demonstrably impossible.   

Or is there just a completely homogenous MSM comprehension of the world which creates an overwhelming confirmation bias for any story compatible with the narrative?

I don't know.  But the more instances where multiple media platforms confirm independently from multiple supposedly independent sources that something happened which did not actually happen, the more obvious it is that there is something fundamentally amiss.

One additional observation.  Perhaps a decade ago, there were a string of media embarrassments where stories unravelled which had been based on single anonymous witnesses.  There was a general media recognition and renewed nominal commitment that journalists should have more than one source and that at least one of those sources needed to be on the record and identified.

I didn't see much improvement at the time and it seems even worse now.  I read reporting where there is a critical central claim and there is only a single source of the claim and they are anonymous.  Basically, these multibillion dollar news organizations have defaulted to printing unverified gossip dressed up as much as they can to seem credible but without any real investigative reporting.