Thread by @ggreenwald

How and why did the media spend an entire month definitively affirming what appears to be a completely false story about the only person said to have been killed by the Capitol mob: Officer Brian Sicknick?

Why do we not know how or even when he died?

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1359680583283130368

It is absolutely impossible that authorities, including those who performed the autopsy, didn’t know very early on that the story being spread over and over by the media — that Sicknick was killed with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob — was false.

Again we see: the factions that spread disinformation most aggressively, effectively and destructively are the very corporate media outlets that claim to find disinformation so harmful.

OK, sometimes “mistakes” are made. This is a huge one. Will there be any self-critique?

This big story published by the NYT about Sicknick’s death is simply false. The headline itself may be false, but the key events it purports to describe never happened. This caused virtually the media to spend a full month repeating this as fact.

nytimes.com/2021/01/08/us/…

Here's the Revolver article that built the case that finally forced media outlets to reckon with the fact that they have been spreading an outright falsehood about Officer Sicknick's death for a month. There's no knowledge about how (or when) he died:

revolver.news/2021/02/maga-b…

Just an absolute falsehood about how Officer Brian Sicknick died, spread over and over by the people with the largest media platforms, to millions and millions of people who will probably never learn that they were deceived yet again.

Look at how viral all of these went. Has a single media outlet issued corrections to their original broadcasts and stories?

And the issue isn’t that the reporting was trivially erroneous because he was killed by the mob with some other means. We have no idea how he died - or even when! Where is the autopsy? Given how central this is to the impeachment trial & media narrative, how can this lie fester?

Lies that serve a political agenda just remain undisturbed because they’re useful and people like them.

How many still believe Omar Mateen — the monster who murdered 49 people at PULSE — set out to murder LGBTs? He didn’t. He had no idea it was a gay club. But it’s a useful lie.

To this day, people get angry when I point out Mateen didn’t seek out a gay club. He just wanted to murder. I didn’t know until I did reporting on the unjust prosecution of his wife.

But it was false. You can’t say it just because it’s politically useful. Same with Sicknick.

Here’s the Mateen reporting. I assumed he had set out to murder LGBTs before I did reporting because the media said it over and over. I assumed Sicknick was murdered with a fire extinguisher. The media spreads falsehoods *constantly* to millions

theintercept.com/2018/03/22/at-…

More here: I’ll bet anything most people still believe the PULSE shooting was motivated by anti-LGBT hatred. It’s wasn’t.

This is why I find media fixations on the “disinformation” from private citizens online so maddening. They spread it so much more:

theintercept.com/2018/03/05/as-…

Almost nothing is known about the death of Officer Brian Sicknick — not how he died or even when — but one thing is 100% clear:

The story told by the media for over a month — not as a theory but as a Known Fact: that protesters killed him with a fire extinguisher — is false.

I’ve heard all day from angry liberals — including “journalists” — that this doesn’t matter, that it’s trivial.

How can it not matter? They don’t hate Fake News or disinformation. It’s their most used weapon.

Even CNN acknowledges its falsity now:

amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/02…

So many of the claims about what happened that day — the “zip-ties” — turned out to be false, all toward melodramatizing what happened.

But spending a month straight repeating a false story over and over about how this officer died is inexcusable. Where are the retractions?