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.
The coverage of the anti-ICE riots in LA is perhaps the clearest example of advocacy “journalism” in Trump’s second term.
Reading the reporting, you would never know the most significant fact: the American people support Trump’s deportations.
Follow along ⤵️
First, the facts about the riots.
You’ve seen the burning cars, looting & clashes between police & protestors.
Demonstrators blocked the freeway, attacked ICE agents, all in an effort to prevent the deportations of illegal aliens. Trump deployed troops to allow ICE to operate.
As @MarkHalperin and @seanspicer discussed, the situation in LA is so tranquil that the mayor has instituted a curfew for the city.
The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.
The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?
But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.
Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.
Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.
Quick 🧵⤵️
A couple quotes:
“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.
What? What does that even mean??
That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?
Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”
Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.
Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.
That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.
Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.
Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.
That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.”