The Mollie Hemingway article that triggered my previous post lays out a lot of facts, many of them recent, that the Danish media—like the American media—still don’t seem interested in reporting.
In a July 27 column from The Hill (“More willful blindness by the media on spying by Obama administration“), Jonathan Turley makes a similar attempt to lay out the most salient facts about the Russian Collusion hoax, and concludes with an opinion as to why they’re not getting more coverage:
Willful blindness has its advantages. The media covered the original leak and the collusion narrative, despite mounting evidence that it was false. They filled hours of cable news shows and pages of print with a collusion story discredited by the FBI. Virtually none of these journalists or experts have acknowledged that the collusion leaks were proven false, let alone pursue the troubling implications of national security powers being used to target the political opponents of an administration. But in Washington, success often depends not on what you see but what you can unsee.
There’s a lot of unseeing going on these days.
When the New York Times announced its decision to drop the pretense of political objectivity in the summer of 2016, many of their peers throughout the establishment media quickly followed suit. They didn’t all do it with the front page bravura of the Times, but the shift in editorial framing was immediately apparent to anyone paying attention.
As Turley points out, however, the great game isn’t all offense: defense must also be played. In the case of Russian Collusion, that means that for all the effort invested in promoting what we now know to have been fabricated case against Donald Trump, there has to be an equal and opposite effort to conceal the wrongdoing of his accusers. After all, the fabricated evidence and false accusations didn’t just show up out of the blue: someone had to do the fabricating and false accusing. Who might that have been?
The partisan media have an answer: Look! A squirrel!
The answers are out there, as Hemingway and Turley make clear in their respective columns. A presidential administration worked with the campaign of its designated successor to use the tools of state—intelligence and law enforcement among them—against a political opponent.
As Turley writes: “The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence.” That’s not an opinion. That is now established fact. Worse, it wasn’t even just false evidence: it was fabricated evidence. It’s banana republic stuff. And it happened.
Or perhaps you hadn’t heard?
It doesn’t have to be a partisan thing. You can still hate Trump and believe that the documented abuses of power by the Obama administration and Clinton campaign were heinous and need to be called out. No cognitive dissonance required. But the brave Knights of the Holy Order of Journalism don’t seem to see it that way. They don’t see it that way because they’ve chosen not to see it at all: they’ve unseen the whole thing.
Obama Good. Clinton Good. Trump Bad. Facts that don’t fit that story line obviously can’t be facts and may therefore be ignored.
Anyone who’s seen All the President’s Men surely found themselves rooting for those plucky journalists to bring corruption to light. These days the journalists are the ones covering up the corruption. . . by not covering it.