Brit Hume says media coverage of Russia investigation was a disaster
The terrible journalistic misjudgment was rooted in the media's view of Donald Trump, says Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume.
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out Tuesday that the “resistance journalism” coined by New York Times media columnist Ben Smith in a weekend column about Ronan Farrow has been practiced for years – with the Russian collusion narrative being Exhibit A.
In fact, CNN’s Trump-era coverage also meets Greenwald’s criteria, Media Research Center vice president Dan Gainor said.
Greenwald argued in a lengthy feature Tuesday that Smith’s most valuable Farrow criticism was his “perfect description of a media sickness borne of the Trump era that is rapidly corroding journalistic integrity and justifiably destroying trust” in the mainstream media.
“Smith aptly dubs this pathology ‘resistance journalism,’ by which he means that journalists are now not only free, but encouraged and incentivized, to say or publish anything they want, no matter how reckless and fact-free, provided their target is someone sufficiently disliked in mainstream liberal media venues and/or on social media,” Greenwald wrote.
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The Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald argued the mainstream media has been partaking in “resistance journalism” for years. (Getty Images, File)
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“As long the targets of one’s conspiracy theories and attacks are regarded as villains by the guardians of mainstream liberal social media circles, journalists reap endless career rewards for publishing unvetted and unproven — even false — attacks on such people, while never suffering any negative consequences when their stories are exposed as shabby frauds,” Greenwald added, noting claims that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia were a prominent recent example of the phenomenon.
“CNN certainly has been the worst on that, as it is with most everything else now. CNN has gone from news source to TV Resistance HQ."
“CNN certainly has been the worst on that, as it is with most everything else now. CNN has gone from news source to TV Resistance HQ. Just look at how many times it has talked about the so-called '25th Amendment' solutions to removing Trump from office,” Gainor told Fox News.
“I’d specifically call out CNN’s media guy Brian Stelter there,” Gainor added. “He actually promoted lawyer, and then inmate, Michael Avenatti as someone he was taking ‘seriously as a contender’ for president. CNN put the 'creepy porn lawyer' on TV 122 times in a year… all so he could attack Trump.”
A video montage posted by the Washington Free Beacon, highlighting Stelter’s obsession with the Russia probe, recently went viral.
Washington Times columnist Tim Young told Fox News, “the piles of resisters who show up to the White House press briefings to ask ridiculous questions or yell at the president and [Press Secretary] Kayleigh McEnany” are also practicing resistance journalism as defined by Greenwald.
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Greenwald even hearkened back to media members who he said botched the story surrounding the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, but who went on to bigger and better things.
“The very journalists who were most wrong in peddling false conspiracy theories were exactly those who ended up most rewarded on the ground that even though they spread falsehoods, they did so for the right cause,” he wrote before naming Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC, the former White House communications director during the administration of then-President George W. Bush.
“Maddow spent three years hyping conspiratorial junk with no need even to retract any of it."
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Greenwald argued, “the same journalism-destroying dynamic is driving the post-Russiagate media landscape” and nobody was being held accountable. He noted that Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple has attempted to hold “these myth-peddlers accountable,” but most liberal journalists, such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, were getting a pass.
“Maddow spent three years hyping conspiratorial junk with no need even to retract any of it,” he wrote.
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Greenwald said it was “well-documented that MSNBC and CNN spent three years peddling all sorts of ultimately discredited Russiagate conspiracy theories” while muting anyone who wanted to make a counter-argument. He wrote that the trend likely will continue because “cable news programs are constructed to feed their audiences only self-affirming narratives” and jobs in journalism have been hard to find.
DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall said Greenwald's comments were “very astute” and it’s clear that a “large swath of the journalism industry now feels it is OK to make a broad judgment on a particular matter and then create and push narratives” that simply confirmed their judgment.
“This approach certainly disrupts the journalistic culture that prevailed for decades in the 20th century, when the news industry believed it should provide all information accurately and let the public decide what to make of it,” McCall told Fox News. “That was an idealistic view, of course, and was never fully operationalized, but it did give the media certain credibility as surrogates for the citizenry.”
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McCall said the model “is being blown up today by a self-righteous crusaderism of certain powerful journalists who think they have an inside track to wisdom” and thus felt compelled to push their preformed agendas onto a mass audience. He said the approach was “totally unhelpful to a democratic society” and compromised journalistic independence.
“The resistance journalism in recent years has been operationalized against Trump,” McCall said. “The Russian collusion story showed the resistance on steroids... the resistance plays out daily in mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post. Primetime shows on MSNBC and CNN are proud to display resistance tendencies.”
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