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October 29, 2022

Media hit job on Clarence Thomas goes down in flames

By Rajan Laad

Back in September, American Oversight, a group that brands itself a government watchdog, claimed to be in possession of emails that showed Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Florida governor Ron DeSantis ate together on June 23.

This was purportedly a day before Thomas and other conservative Supreme Court Justices struck down Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion across the U.S.

News outlets such as Raw Story, Yahoo News, MSN news, and The Independent reported this news to cause much outrage in the liberal ecosystem.

The implication was that DeSantis had somehow influenced Thomas in the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

The notion that a conservative Supreme Court justice had lunch with a Republican governor was unacceptable to liberals across the U.S.

The Supreme Court is expected to be apolitical and is supposed to adjudicate based on the laws and previous cases.  Even the perception of bias was unacceptable.

Being political is a privilege that is available only to liberal Supreme Court justices.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was applauded for being political for calling Donald Trump the worst person on Earth.  The New York Times reported about Ginsburg having a quiet lunch with then-president Barack Obama in his private dining room in July 2013, as if it were normal.

Unfortunately for the peddlers of the DeSantis-Thomas story, facts presented themselves to burst the inflating balloon of propaganda.

The inconvenient fact here was that Justice Thomas had lunch with DeSantis, on June 23, 2021, and not on June 23, 2022.  The lunch took place a year before and not a day before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

This mistake reveals how little various media personnel understand about the functioning of the Supreme Court.

Did they really think that DeSantis persuaded Thomas over lunch and Thomas subsequently convinced his conservative colleagues and they overturned Roe the very next day?

Did these media personnel, some of whom are well educated and have years of experience, think Roe was overturned via a tweet?

The Supreme Court issues a lengthy document to elucidate its rationale.  This is a drawn-out process that involves discussions, consultation, and documentation.  A great deal of thought had been put into this effort.

So how did the media react when facts were presented?

Raw Story stated the following in its correction:

"A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Clarence Thomas had lunch with Ron DeSantis one day before the controversial Dobbs decision. The lunch was scheduled for June 23, 2021, not June 23, 2022."

The headline was altered from "Clarence Thomas had lunch with Ron DeSantis one day before abortion rights struck down: emails" to "Emails reveal communications between Clarence Thomas and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis."

The Independent retracted its story.

Eric Michael Garcia, the author, who works at MSNBC, issued an apology on Twitter.

But the propagandists at Occupy Democrats were unmoved by facts.  They demanded an investigation and claimed that Justice Thomas was "exposed":

Impervious to facts, the same group even recommended the impeachment of Justice Thomas.

How did this happen?

This fake story is a symptom of what has become of the mainstream media.

A lot of people presume that the media are influenced by the Democrats.  That supposition is erroneous because it assumes that the Democrats and the media are separate entities.  The fact is that the mainstream media are the propaganda wing for the Democrats and hence should be seen as a department within the party.

This explains why, on any given day, they all have identical opinions and even phraseology to describe any given incident.

Liberals often proclaim support for diversity.  This usually is the diversity of background, religion, sex, sexual orientation, race, etc.  But alas, the most important kind of diversity is abhorred: the diversity of ideological proclivities, political persuasion, and general worldview, because it causes discord in the echo chambers.

Hence, when a story such as the one in question appears on their desk, they are all consumed by the desire for it to be true.  Consequently, they either purposefully or unknowingly overlook the important details and publish the story anyway.

If there were real diversity in the newsrooms, there would have been conservative fact-checkers who would have had the motivation to debunk the story. They would have spotted the obvious mistake.

But that will never happen.

Some of these news organizations offer paid subscriptions.  The subscribers are an extension of the liberal echo chamber.  They pay to have their biases confirmed.  They would probably prefer fake news that confirms their bias rather than factual news that violates their preconceived notions.

The news had become a product from which customers expect predictability.

The news organizations also know that there will seldom be any consequences for peddling fake news.  In fact, they receive awards.

In 2018, both the New York Times and the Washington Post were awarded the Pulitzer "for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign."

The Russian collusion hoax has been debunked, but the Pulitzers haven't been revoked.

A major conflict of interest was revealed in the Pulitzer jury.  Among the members of the Pulitzer Board was past Pulitzer-winner Carlos Lozada, non-fiction book critic and associate editor at the Washington Post.

But it hardly matters.  The ecosystem or echo system doesn't care about being factual or objective or neutral; they are blatant propagandists and no longer care to hide it.

As a consumer, you have two choices: presume that what you read is false until proven true, or consume news only from carefully selected news organizations.

Photo credit: Official portrait.

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