The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The ‘Misinformation’ Scam

Posted on | July 11, 2024 | Comments Off on The ‘Misinformation’ Scam

Just yesterday I noted my shock that Jon Stewart (!!!) is now apparently a MAGA extremist, and I guess we’ll have to add Nate Silver’s name to the list, now that he’s admitted that the term “misinformation” has been “hijacked as a cover for partisan bias.” Barely two weeks ago, you were a right-wing conspiracy theorist peddling “misinformation” if you suggested that videos showed Joe Biden in a condition of diminished cognitive capacity. “Cheap fakes!” they shrieked, and their army of allegedly objective “fact-checkers” pushed back against any such suggestion. “The right-wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because of, the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on June 17. Ten days later, Biden’s performance during the debate proved who actually has the “credibility problem,” and it ain’t “right-wing critics.” Suddenly, every Democrat and liberal media hack claimed to have discovered — “shocked! shocked!” like Captain Renault in Casablanca — that the “misinformation” was true.

While we wait for our apology — and I expect it to be a long wait — let’s take a moment to ask: How did we get here? When did concern about “misinformation” become a sort of cottage industry, and why?

Remember? It was 2016 and the Hillary Clinton campaign had some narrative problems. There was that thing about her doing State Department business via a secret personal server, which was destroyed in what was clearly an act of obstruction of justice (for which she was never prosecuted), and then there was a leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee confirming what everybody already knew, namely that the fix was in at the DNC to guarantee Hillary the nomination and screw over Bernie Sanders. The need to distract from these scandals helped fuel the Clinton campaign’s operation to smear Donald Trump as engaged in “collusion” with sinister Russian forces. The DNC emails were not a leak, we were told, but rather the result of a Russian hacking operation. And if you pushed back against that claim, you were accused of being a Putin stooge and your Twitter account might get shut down because somebody called you a “bot” or a “troll.”

Then the unthinkable happened — Hillary lost the election — and one of the consequences was that suddenly the fight against “misinformation” was portrayed as a patriotic effort to SAVE OUR DEMOCRACY by preventing Russian “election interference.” By the way, have you ever heard of a guy named Seth Abramson? He’s a guy who pitches himself as an “investigative journalist” while exploiting the paranoia of gullible left-wingers by telling them that EVERYTHING THEY FEAR IS REAL!

Until Wednesday, I’d never paid any attention to Seth Abramson until (via Memeorandum) I got a look at this headline:

We Now Know What Really Happened in Atlanta
Media lied to voters about the cause of President Biden’s subpar debate performance. The lie — described here in full — is unforgivable, and was intended to chill discussion of Trump’s cognitive decline.

Wow. He bought a ticket on the train to Crazytown and rode it all the way. Here is the essence of Abramson’s claim:

At the time major media began harping on President Biden’s alleged cognitive decline, progressive dissatisfaction with the lack of coverage of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline had reached a fever pitch. The only way for major media to resolve the situation in its favor was to turn a one-night situation whose causes and implications it quickly understood to be (respectively) transient and virtually non-existent into a bigger story that would at once plump ratings, virtue-signal even-handedness, and put progressive critics back on their heels. 

Do you believe that? Or better yet, can you possibly imagine anyone being dumb enough to believe that? Because I must point out that Seth Abramson is a New York Times bestselling author of such titles as Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America (2018), Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy (2019), Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump (2020), and Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection (2022).

And did I mention he used to appear frequently on CNN?

Wikipedia tells us, “Writers at The New Republic and The Atlantic have described Abramson as a conspiracy theorist,” and further directs us to a review of Abramson’s first book (which was compiled from his numerous Twitter threads about the “Russian collusion” claim) by Scottish journalist Harry McGrath:

What it doesn’t do is prove anything despite Abramson’s insistence in the introduction that “Proof of collusion in the Trump-Russia case is in plain sight”. Amassed theories and suggestive juxtapositions notwithstanding, we end up with something closer to the Scottish “not proven” verdict with its unique mix of moral conviction of guilt and inability to conclusively prove the case.

So the guy who claimed to have proven that the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” hoax was true now claims that the media are covering up the “fact” that Donald Trump’s cognitive ability is impaired. You see how the narratives propagated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign have led to a situation in which any claim that reflects badly on Trump is acceptable, even the most obviously counter-factual claims peddled by someone whom liberal journalists call a conspiracy theorist, even while an entire industry has been created to smear any criticism of Biden as “misinformation.”

Glenn Reynolds calls our attention to a lengthy item by Matt Taibbi about the Clemson University “Media Forensics Hub,” which began in 2017 when two faculty members “worked together to uncover and expose more than 3 million tweets by Russian trolls.” Allegedly, I hasten to add. If your account got banned from Twitter because these two guys decided you were a “Russian troll,” far be it from me to accept such defamation at face-value. Given the current situation, when CNN is now running a 24/7 effort to push Biden off the Democratic ticket because of a cognitive impairment which they previously dismissed as “misinformation,” I would urge everyone to be skeptical about any such claims.



 

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Category: Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump, Media Bias

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