The Morning Briefing: NBC Fake News Blues Edition

(Image: CC/Flckr/Adam Fagen)

Chet Huntley Weeps

Rough Hump Day for the once-proud Peacock Network’s news division, which ended up having two of its “journalists” issue public retractions after being so eager to make President Trump look bad that neither bothered to do any basic fact-checking.

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My friend, RedState Editor Kira Davis, summed it up nicely:

Tyler O’Neil has more detail on the O’Donnell story here, and Stephen Green covered the Dilanian USCIS screw-up here.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when both of these incidents could have been looked on as mistakes and both O’Donnell and Dilanian might even have been praised for correcting the record rather quickly.

As we are all painfully aware, we do not live in that time.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that O’Donnell knew his story was garbage from the get-go. He’s a hack’s hack, prone to fits of rage and delusion. The “rigorous verification and standards process” at MSNBC is this:

  1. Is it something negative about President Trump?
  2. OK, then it meets our standards.

Had the president’s attorneys not forced him to, O’Donnell would have stuck by the story as if he’d read it in the Bible.

And then he would have yelled at an intern until she cried.

Dilanian, while still a leftmedia hack, probably wasn’t as deliberate as Larry O. The pathology is the same, however.

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The desire to smear the president and disrupt this presidency is a shared derangement throughout NBC News. Dilanian was eager to get something that would have reflected poorly on the president out into the world and didn’t bother reading carefully.

I said Dilianian “probably” wasn’t as deliberate, but he may very well have been.

O’Donnell’s falsehood was seen and heard by his show’s viewers, which isn’t the largest of audiences.

The misinformation about the USCIS policy hit social media and spread like wildfire. That’s how the real fake news happens. Although Dilanian did correct himself rather quickly, the damage was done.

His correction was tweeted a little after 5 p.m. EDT. As of 11 p.m. EDT, Politico was still running the misleading version of the story:

Clearing up the time stamp on that: Twitter shows my local time. I also have a screenshot of that should it end up being deleted.

Old media people have quickly become adept at using new media to spread innuendo and disinformation. Whenever they’re reporting about social media being used for nefarious purposes, it’s more projection from them. As I’ve written before: everything from the left is projection now.

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The New York Times Finds an Old Monster Back Under the Bed

Some low-functioning dillhole at the Times was apparently too afraid to waste one of his precious few remaining brain cells on something so demanding as an original thought, so he dusted off one they keep on file there: blame the Tea Party movement for everything.

The word-barf is titled “The Tea Party Didn’t Get What It Wanted, but It Did Unleash the Politics of Anger.”

That headline doesn’t bend the truth, it’s just a flat-out lie.

Nobel embarrassment Paul Krugman tweeted the link to the article and used the opportunity to resurrect a couple of lies of his own:

I responded:

I spent three years traveling the country and speaking to Tea Party groups large and small. The only time there was any anger was anytime we were gathered in D.C. and trying to navigate the ridiculously different liquor laws in the capital, Maryland, and Virginia. The events were usually one big party. “The Kruiser Kabana” was actually a party I would throw at Tea Party gatherings.

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It is upsetting whenever this “angry mob” falsehood is written about not just because it is a lie, but because it’s a lie that lives on. It’s bad enough that we dealt with them lying about us all the time back then (oh, the stories), but the badmouthing continues years after the fact, when it’s easier for them to get away with.

Last year, Politico actually tried to blame all of the Trump-era unhinged leftist behavior on the Tea Party movement. I had a few words to say about that.

Enough about the liars, let’s link.

PJM Linktank

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Bee Me

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The Kruiser Kabana

I’m hunting down some of my cousins there and moving: Irish study says Irishmen are drinking too much and beer is too cheap

TOM LEHRER, PEOPLE! (turn it up)

Don’t forget to stretch. You’re going to need to be nimble for the apocalypse.

___

Stephen Kruiser is the author ofDon’t Let the Hippies ShowerandStraight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.”

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