MICHAEL WALSH: American Media and Old Soviet Media Are Now Peas in a Pod.
This correction in the “news” pages of The Washington Post a few days ago is simply stunning—and tells you all you need to know about the state of the mainstream media today:
“Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so.
“Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now…’ The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.”
The story, part of the Post’s scorched-earth coverage of the former president’s activities in the aftermath of the disputed 2020 election, sought to depict Trump in the worst possible light, while relying entirely on anonymous “sources” who had a vested interest in destroying the Trump presidency. It begins:
“President Trump urged Georgia’s lead elections investigator to identify wrongdoing in the state’s vote in a December phone call, saying the official would be praised for doing so, according to an individual briefed on the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation… The president’s attempts to intervene in an ongoing investigation could amount to obstruction of justice or other criminal violations, legal experts said, though they cautioned a case could be difficult to prove.”
(This “corrected” story is not to be confused with this one from Jan. 3, which charged Trump with “flagrant abuse of power and a potential criminal act” in a conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which was based on a leaked recording of their private conversation.)
A better headline for the Post’s “correction,” of course, would be “Washington Post irresponsibly publishes false story based on malicious hearsay,” but that would be a bridge too far for the Democratic operatives currently masquerading as journalists at newspapers such as the Post and The New York Times. In the interest of pursuing their shared political and social objectives, the major media have aligned their fortunes with the Democrats’, and now no longer even pay lip service to the industry’s former ideals of impartiality and fairness.
Earlier: Matt Taibbi on The Sovietization of the American Press.