For those not familiar, @nytimes broke a story a few months back about Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops, with Trump turning a blind eye.
That would be an an enormous, awful story, worthy of outrage.
Problem is, there’s no evidence to support it. @NBCNews
It’s hard to overstate how widely circulated this original story from @nytimes was, or how frequently the Times doubled down on it.
2 months of investigation from the military, who vowed to get to the bottom of up, turned up empty.
Not a word of followup.
Of course, @nytimes wasn’t alone. Plenty of other outlets picked up the reporting - which @realDonaldTrump called “fake news” and which many conservatives and others pushed back on as thinly sourced at best.
This of course included the most outspoken of left-wing conspiratorialists, @JoyAnnReid.
@Newsweek also decided to go full out on this one.
The very thought that these were just allegations was dropped from their coverage. The coverage of these unverified claims takes them as a given.
See how a narrative develops?
And @washingtonpost reminds us why “news analysis” is the bane of my existence.
And the Democrats from all over got involved in the act. Here’s the lead on legislation for an investigation into the unconfirmed reports, @SenDuckworth.
You see, it’s easy to look like the good guy when the narrative is such that these claims - far from proved - are true.
and it wouldn’t be a potential Russian-related conspiracy theory without @RepAdamSchiff
There were plenty of others, but I’ve only got so much room to work with. Here we’ve got the whole coalition @TheDemCoalition and everyone’s favorite @RepSwalwell
As ever, the bluechecks really outdid themselves on this one. You’ll be not shocked to see @JRubinBlogger going headlong into this one before we’ve found any evidence beyond the Times reporting.
And I get it. The absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence. These allegations could well prove true - both the Russians and the Taliban being what they are.
But doesn’t it give anyone pause that, after an investigation, there’s been no corroboration of this reporting?
Doesn’t it bother anyone at all that an entire outrage news cycle was whipped up based on one unverified report?
Doesn’t that seem like...not the way things should work? Haven’t we learned a thing or two about trust-but-verify on sensational stories by now?
I’m not some military or intel professional. Maybe there’s a ton that I don’t know & maybe these people know it.
But the rush to conclusion & judgement here was swift, and that just seems all kinds of bad to me.
And I don’t expect any apologies or corrections are forthcoming.
Do you remember how bad the media’s “Covid lab leak” - the hypothesis that the virus came from a lab - coverage was?
I thought I did. But it was a more dramatic example of uniform media malpractice than even I remembered.
So I revisited it. Buckle in, it’s long. ⤵️
It started in Feb 2020 when @SenTomCotton suggested looking into the CCP lab studying bats near the initial cases in Wuhan.
The media were outraged. In a since-updated piece, @washingtonpost said the idea was a “conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.”
It wasn’t just WaPo. Shortly thereafter, @nytimes trotted out a similar allegation, calling the lab leak hypothesis a “fringe theory” and a “tale” designed to inflame social media.
@CNN’s @ChrisCillizza said Cotton was “playing a dangerous game” with his suggestions.
The reason I take screenshots is that I'm always paranoid that an outlet or journalist will scrap the evidence of a bad take. Maybe I should be giving folks more credit for standing by their inaccuracies.
Every so often I check back in on this, perhaps my all-time favorite headline from @NPR, only to see that it still exists in its original form, from April 2020.
I launched a newsletter, called Holden Court, about the media, what they get wrong & why it matters. The goal is to reach beyond what my 🧵s have on Twitter & to build a better recent history of media & media criticism.
You can sign up at the link in my bio. More ⤵️
At that link you can read my launch piece and get a better idea of what it is that I’m trying to do.
The piece also walks through a recent example of bad media coverage that I worry we’re already forgetting about: the start of Covid.
My general premise for the newsletter is that media criticism could be a lot better; more driven by what the media actually does and says and more set in recent context, rather than an impressionistic sense that the media is hopelessly off-track.
I’m launching something new, so naturally I figured the best explainer was a 🧵thread🧵.
Introducing Holden Court, my Substack about the media, what it gets wrong, and why it matters.
You probably know the drill, but more details & links to sign up in the tweets below. ⤵️
Holden Court aims to unpack media failures, particularly when the media misses in unison on important political topics. But I’ll also have one-off content, Q&A opportunities, a mailbag and maybe virtual (or even in person) happy hours, too.
That doesn’t mean the threads are going away. But the amount of context and nuance I can capture in a thread is limited. So the Substack will (hopefully) provide that more robust analysis, aiming ultimately at *why* the media misses the way that it does.
“15 days to slow the spread” kicked off four years ago Saturday, sending the media into perhaps its most deranged cycle of my lifetime.
I dove back into some of the worst lockdown media coverage from those early days.
Buckle in, this one’s long. ⤵️
The real worst of the coverage was when states started reopening. The media outrage was palpable. Republicans wanted people to die, we were told.
Remember @TheAtlantic’s “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”? You may’ve forgotten how wild the text of it was. I did.
But that wasn’t a one off sentiment. The belief four years ago among the media was that allowing people to leave their homes was tantamount to killing people.
@washingtonpost called it a “deadly error” — not in an opinion piece, mind you, but in a “health” news headline.
Another media conspiracy, this time that Trump attacked a Secret Service agent on Jan 6, imploded yesterday.
Remember when the media—in unison—reported the “bombshell” allegations as fact?
I do. And I’ve got screenshots.⤵️
You’re familiar with the story I suspect but just in case: when former aid Cassidy Hutchinson testified Trump had “lunged” for a secret service steering wheel on Jan. 6, the media rushed to print the salacious (& false) claims as true.
Here’s @NBCNews @CNN @ABC @washingtonpost
Trump was allegedly going to drive himself to the Capitol to take part in the riot.
That’s what @CBSNews @Independent @NPR @NewsHour said.