The Media Research Center’s extended whining that non-right-wing media haven’t bought into the right-wing “Russia hoax” hoax continued in a July 31 post by Bill D’Agostino:
CNN and MSNBC still refuse to engage in good faith with DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s document dump, which implicated the former Obama administration in a conspiracy against then-President elect Trump. Instead, hosts and guests alike on these outlets have unanimously deemed the whole thing a “baseless conspiracy theory,” as well as an attempt by the Trump administration to distract the public from Democrats’ sudden intense interest in Jeffrey Epstein.
Over the past seven days, pretty much every left-wing cable news segment about Russiagate has followed the same formula:
1) The host introduces the topic as a fanciful Trump-world delusion.
2) Someone calls it “a distraction from Epstein” and is rewarded with vigorous head pats.
3) The entire panel chants: “baseless; unfounded; conspiracy theory,” in unison, until the segment cuts to commercial.That’s barely even an exaggeration.
Rather than bothering to disprove any of those claims, D’Agostino went conspiratorial:
Consider what the corporate media’s apathy towards this story reveals about their priorities. They’re apathetic because they believe, in hindsight, that it was worth sacrificing their credibility to basically hamstring the first Trump administration.
From a corporate journalist’s perspective, Russiagate was the two-year period in which the media destroyed their own credibility by pursuing an utter fabrication. And yet, none of them appear upset about being so disastrously misled. None of them even want to know where the conspiracy theory came from. Whose idea was it? Who helped concoct it? How many people helped disseminate it? They don’t care to know.
Clearly, therefore, the corporate media’s loyalty — whether to Barack Obama, or the Democratic Party writ large, or both — takes precedence over their concern for their own credibility and journalistic integrity. Otherwise, they’d be doing something other than blindly defending the people who led them around by the nose for almost the entirety of 2017 and 2018.
Note that D’Agostino won’t say what this “utter fabrication” is that he’s speaking of — perhaps because he knows that his mandated narrative is the fabrication. Indeed, much of the so-called evidence in this current document drop was reviewed years earlier by the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee and was rejected.
Meanwhile, Luis Cornelio spent an Aug. 6 post whining that Google also wouldn’t play along with the right-wing narrative:
When President Donald Trump accused Barack Obama of treason, he didn’t panic or call a lawyer, Google cleaned it up for free.
A new Media Research Center study uncovered how Google manipulated its news tab to subvert Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s exposé on how the former president orchestrated the fabrication of intelligence behind the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
The MRC found that Google actively protected Obama after Gabbard revealed how his White House schemed behind the scenes to override early assessments finding no pro-Trump Russian interference in 2016, instead pushing rushed intel to legitimize the salacious Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
Gabbard specifically asserted that Obama had manipulated intelligence to promote a “contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win.” She said this was done to usurp the will of the American voter during her July 23 press briefing.
But Google quickly shut down the story by boosting articles on its news tab that, among other things, accused Gabbard in headlines of “lying,” called her statements a “desperate move” to distract from the Epstein claims, smeared her as pushing a “MAGA” conspiracy, and claimed she was trying to “rewrite” history. One article even mocked her evidence as “based on thin gruel.”
Cornelio made no effort to disprove that assessment. Instead, he huffed that even the right-wing Fox News wouldn’t play along:
In total, 37 outlets were identified—33 classified as left-leaning and just four as right-leaning.
All four right-leaning articles came from a single source: Fox News. Of those, three focused on attacks against Gabbard’s findings. In other words, 36 out of 37 stories pushed by Google amplified a leftist agenda.
One Fox News article, for example, covered Sen. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) claims that Gabbard’s conclusion was “dishonest.” Two others were video articles showcasing NBC’s Kristen Welker grilling Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) over the documents.
That leaves just one article provided by Google that straightforwardly summarized the DNI accusations.
Intern Matthew Seck tried his hand at parroting the narrative in an Aug. 6 post:
On Tuesday night’s The Briefing, MSNBC’s Jen Psaki ran a segment about the recently declassified Durham annex in relation to the Russia collusion hoax. The new document released by Senator Chuck Grassley appeared to shed more light on Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the conspiracy to use the idea of collusion to explain President Trump’s 2016 win. Despite new evidence, Psaki called the documents completely fake and still pushed a Russian collusion narrative.
Psaki claimed the entire document was false based off of a New York Times report that omitted the full truth:
[…]For Psaki to call the reports totally fake was bad reporting. The document said some of the emails were composites of real emails actually hacked by the Russians. It confirmed the Russians hacked many think tank targets and details of other evidence corroborating that the “Clinton Plan” was a real thing the Russians discovered was also in the documents.
But in special counsel John Durham — whose attempt to put a pro-Trump spin on things the MRC greatly admired, then did cleanup for when his attempted prosecutions failed — refused to take those documents seriously, why should anyone else? Seck didn’t explain that.
P.J. Gladnick returned to grousing that non-right-wing media weren’t biting in an Aug. 7 post:
It is becoming harder and harder for the media to ignore the Russiagate scandal. And that difficulty in journalism avoidance just became much more difficult with the announcement that Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered a grand jury probe.
Unfortunately for them, the distraction excuse for not covering the Russia Hoax is becoming a worn routine and pretending that the damning material in the Durham annex, such as the email of Leonard Bernardo implicating Hillary Clinton as a perpetrator of the Russia Hoax along with high level intelligence officials, is really nothing more than Russian disinformation has already been thoroughly mocked when Rolling Stone attempted that pathetic excuse. So what to do? What to do?
Well, it appears that NBC News seems to have settled on citing supposedly authoritative officials in an attempt to discredit the Russiagate revelations. The big problem is that those officials are also unnamed as you can see presented on Monday by NBC News excuse mongers Michael Kosnar, Dan De Luce, David Rohde and Vaughn Hillyard in “Pam Bondi orders grand jury probe of Obama administration review of 2016 election.”
Rather than risk allowing reader an extra second or two of contemplation about validity of that probe before reading the body of the report, NBC News immediately provided this Democrat-echo subheading: “Past probes, including two conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes. Democrats have accused Bondi of trying to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.”
Like the others, Gladnick can’t be bothered to prove that assessment wrong — instead, he whines about the use of anonymous sources.