PrintHow modern media became the world's second-oldest profession
Part I – Watergate
Maybe it started with Watergate — the accepted mythology being how two intrepid gumshoe cub reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, following the facts where they led to speak truth to power, ultimately brought down the popularly elected (by a landslide of historic proportions) sitting U.S. president, Richard Nixon. This is certainly the story they told in their self-aggrandizing memoir, All the President's Men.
As is often the case, the true story isn't quite as shiny or heroic. As we now know, their primary source, "Deep Throat," was the disgruntled FBI associate director Mark Felt. Mr. Felt had an axe to grind with Nixon for bypassing him when naming the replacement to head the FBI upon the passing of its (too) longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover.
While sitting in on briefings from top-level agents investigating the Watergate Hotel burglary, Felt was able to spoon-feed confidential information to the aforementioned Woodward and Bernstein for them not only to pursue, but publish in the pages of their employer, the Washington Post. Felt's investigators were shocked to see details of their investigation in the pages of the Post and knew that Felt had to be the source of the leaks.
As they say, the rest is history. The Post was able to poison public support for Nixon to the extent that he was ultimately forced to resign the office to avoid impeachment.
The blueprint was set. Deep State actors could influence public opinion by manipulating or colluding with media operatives to establish and propagate a desired narrative. I distinguish between manipulation and collusion only to differentiate Watergate from Russiagate. I don't think Woodward and Bernstein could have found their own backsides with both hands, and as such, without direction from Felt, the story would have gone nowhere. Good reporters would have questioned the motives of a source to provide color and context to their reporting, but I don't see any evidence of that in the Watergate saga. I see them more as unwitting dupes than good reporters or co-conspirators with Felt. Useful idiots, perhaps.
Part II – Russiagate
Fast-forward to 2016 and the election of Donald J. Trump. Trump was the most outside of outsiders. He wasn't only not a member of the D.C. club; he wasn't even allowed to swim in the pond. Trump threatened to upend most every aspect of the Uniparty's long-running rape and plunder of American taxpayers. The die was cast. They had to bring him down, or corruption on a grand scale would be exposed and much of the ruling class brought down.
Enter "Russiagate," the absurd notion that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to secure the nomination. I'm not going to rehash too many of the details here because we all know the story. Hillary Clinton's campaign came up with the idea to smear Trump as a Russian asset (the Steele Dossier), to deflect attention from her own email scandal. John Brennan's CIA got wind of this plot and briefed both the Obama White House and FBI on the scheme. Instead of exposing the dirtiest of political tricks in history, both camps seemed to say, "What can we do to help?"
And help they did! Much of it came in the form of strategic leaks to media outlets to get what they all knew was disinformation into the pages of the nation's most influential media outlets for the express purpose of sliming Trump's election as illegitimate and his presidency as primarily serving the interests of Vladimir Putin.
Part III – JournoList
Historically, journalism wasn't an endeavor that involved pack hunting. A reporter would follow a story and rarely, without input from outside his own newsroom, bring that story to press. Ezra Klein's JournoList, established in the halcyon days of Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, changed all of that.
The New York Times (NYT) and Washington Post (WaPo), from their perch atop the liberal media pyramid as it evolved in the wake of the JournoList, drove the content of the rest of the mainstream media ecosystem. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, HuffPo, Slate, Politico, and myriad other liberal outlets took their lead from NYT and WaPo.
As such, seeding a story in either of these outlets guaranteed media saturation. It's widely recognized that NYT is the outlet of choice for the FBI and the national law enforcement (DOJ...) blob, while WaPo is the go-to outlet for the CIA and other elements of the national intelligence blob.
Both our law enforcement and intelligence communities worked overtime to seed the Russiagate stories, both knowing how false they were, into these outlets and into the conscience of the American public.
The question that must be asked here is, where were the real reporters? Why would they risk their credibility reporting "stories" always laden with anonymous sources, from both the intelligence and law enforcement communities, without questioning the motives of those sources or outing them once it was known that the information they provide was false?
Sadly, the answer is simple. Unlike their predecessors Woodward and Bernstein, WaPo's David Ignatius and his fellow Russiagate media hacks weren't unwitting dupes. They were active co-conspirators.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a dozen times, and you're not fooling me; we're acting in concert.
Part IV – Huntergate
When the New York Post initially published the "Laptop from Hell" story, the response from the Biden camp and their allies in the Deep State and media was instantaneous. In fact, the FBI had gotten out in front of it by warning social media sites about a Russian disinformation campaign that would be related to Hunter Biden. And when it hit, the social media sites dutifully deep-sixed it.
The Biden camp followed up with Deep State allies to create the 51 intelligence and former intelligence officials deeming the laptop story to "have all the earmarks of a Russian information operation" letter. Interestingly, they didn't declare it a disinformation operation, perhaps because they knew that it was true, but that's neither here nor there. Biden used the ruse manufactured by his own campaign to discredit Trump's questioning of the laptop story in the ensuing presidential debate, and, as always, the corporate media had his back every step of the way.
And now, with each passing day, more details of the Biden family raking in millions and millions of dollars from foreign actors through a myriad of shell companies set up for no other reason than to obscure the money trail come to light. The corporate media's response to all of this isn't to report the details of the allegations or evidence, rather to discredit them and smear those bringing them to light.
It's silly to say that if Donald Trump and his family were the targets of these accusations the hue and cry from the corporate media would be deafening. Yet in the case of the corrupt Biden crime family, crickets.
Part V – Conclusion
That the corporate media have prostituted themselves to become no more than a mouthpiece for the Democrat party is undeniable. They bury the truth and propagate known falsehoods. I suppose when your team is in power, there is no longer any need to speak truth to it.
Democracy does indeed die in darkness. Savor the irony.
