Thread by @caitoz

‘Confirmed’ Has Become A Meaningless Word In Mainstream News Reporting

"The reader assumes they’re confirming the source’s claim is true, but all they’re confirming is that the first reporter didn’t just make up the claim they’re uncritically parroting."
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

Last week @politico published a report that the “Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa” in retaliation for the assassination of Soleimani earlier this year, citing (you guessed it) anonymous government officials.

The claim was nonsensical on its face; the idea that Iran would see the killing of some random ambassador to an irrelevant country as a proportionate response to the killing of its beloved top military commander would only make sense to someone with a very US-centric worldview.

On top of that, the South African government published a statement that “the information provided is not sufficient to sustain the allegation that there is a credible threat against the United States Ambassador to South Africa”.
gov.za/speeches/state…

The flimsy nature of this allegation was of course not enough to prevent bombastic Twitter threats from America’s manchild-in-chief that this nonexistent assassination plot “will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!” if carried out.

It also wasn’t enough to prevent the Politico article’s co-author, @NatashaBertrand, from falsely claiming that The New York Times had “confirmed” her reporting.

The New York Times has in fact not confirmed Bertrand and Toosi’s reporting, and Bertrand omits a very significant portion of text from her excerpt. Here is the quote in full, bold mine:

So NYT had in fact merely spoken to unnamed officials (probably some of the same ones) and found there to be misgivings about the claim Bertrand promoted, and then Bertrand deceptively omitted text which contradicted the claim she was making that her report had been “confirmed”.

But Bertrand’s slimy manipulation is also to be expected because she knows she can get away with it. The word “confirmed” has been misused and abused to such a spectacular extent in mainstream news reporting of late that it doesn’t actually mean anything anymore when they say it.

Take the "Russian bounties" story first reported by NYT. We now know this story was completely baseless, but when it first broke there were a bunch of mass media reporters buzzing around claiming to have “confirmed” one another’s stories on the matter.

"Confirmed".

And again, this story has since been 100% discredited (medium.com/@caityjohnston…).

All three of these men were lying.

Oop.

Earlier this month @ggreenwald published an article titled “Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using ‘Confirmed’ to Mean Its Opposite”, about an anonymously sourced claim by The Atlantic that Trump had said disparaging things about US troops.

An excerpt:

Greenwald documents how MSNBC and CBS falsely claimed to have "independently confirmed" CNN's false report that @DonaldJTrumpJr had received early access to a WikiLeaks drop. Turned out literally no one from any of those outlets was reading their source information correctly.

That’s three mainstream outlets — CNN, MSNBC, and CBS, all claiming to have independently “confirmed” a story that would have been recognized as false if even one person in any of those outlets had done the tiniest bare minimum of independent investigation.

They didn’t, because that’s the state of the mass media today. That is its culture. The western mass media are nothing but a bunch of lackeys mindlessly regurgitating incendiary narratives by those in power in their rapacious search for ratings.

Natasha Bertrand is acutely aware of this, which is why she feels comfortable falsely telling the world that her absurd reporting has been “confirmed”.

So now you know. Whenever you see the mass media saying an important claim has been “confirmed”, just ignore them. They have no respect for that word, and it has lost all meaning among their ranks.

The western media class does not exist to tell you the truth about the world, it exists to distort your understanding of the world for the advantage of the powerful.

Nice.