Die MSM, Die – Rewriting history

In the famous novel Nineteen Eighty Four, the job of the main protagonist, Winston Smith, is to rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, in order to bring it in line with current political thinking.

One of the aspects of the book that may have been missed by critics is that it would be quite possible to have aspects of the dystopian future appear in real life without all the rest of the totalitarian nightmare.

So far.

Another miss of the book is that it never foresaw the possibility of the private sector effectively becoming a arm of the government, something I would have thought Orwell would have lept upon, but then the book was more designed at taking a shot at Lenin and Stalin’s USSR by imagining the same thing happening in Britain, rather than trying to predict where our capitalist social democracies would go in the future.

In any case, we’ve arrived at full WInston Smith mode, courtesy of the Washington Post:

That’s right kids, in the wake of the Wuhan Lab Leak theory suddenly going from a Conspiracy Theory to damned near certain, the WaPo did not just suddenly do a backflip on reporting that – along with the rest of the howling MSM banshees – they determined to change their own past.

In this case by changing the headline and parts of a fifteen month-old story where they gleefully slammed a Republican Senator named Tom Cotton when he raised the theory by saying that it had been “debunked”. That word, together with “conspiracy theory” have also been wiped from the body of the headline.

New Washington Post motto: Democracy dies in stealth edits of old headlines.

There’s plenty more on this story that has broken in the last week which deserves a post of its own, but for now I’ll leave you with the Anti-Trump right-wing magazine, The National Review and former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy:

Of course, it’s only circumstantial evidence. We may never know the truth.”

If I’ve heard this once, over more decades than I care to admit, I’ve heard it a thousand times. It is the rote dismissal of circumstantially based cases, and it is almost always wrong.
…
I was a prosecutor for a long time, and prosecutors are in the business of proving stuff. Every good one will tell you that the best case is a strong circumstantial case. It is the most airtight and least problematic kind of proof.

Circumstantial cases are a tapestry of objectively provable facts. No one of those facts, by itself, establishes the ultimate conclusion for which all the interconnected facts collectively stand. Instead, each single fact supports a subordinate proposition that must be true in order for the ultimate conclusion to be valid. Stitch enough of those subordinate propositions together and the ultimate conclusion is inexorable.

In this case the conclusion that China is culpable for this disaster.

But the point of this post is that none of this is new knowledge or evidence. There have been places reporting on the known facts for a year now, and stringing them together in reasonable ways. Arguments could be made and were made in opposition, but there was never any intelligent, rational, reason to be so dismissive as were the Intellectual Giants of Probity like the WaPo, who never shifted off their backsides to actually ask tough questions of the likes of Peter Daszak, the poster boy behind the Lancet article that laid the groundwork for the MSM’s approach to this.

The sort of questions real investigative MSM journalists would have asked in the dim, distant past: like what Daszak’s motives were and how real and pure they were, what his connections to the Chinese Lung Rot virus were, scientifically, politically and financially.

But they didn’t. They just acted as stenographers of “The Experts”. It also helped immensely that such reporting might have helped Trump, and in 2020 that was not going to happen.

Aside from the virus there has also been a slow, steady – and for me anyway – an entirely predictable MSM turn in the reporting on the Burn Loot Murder and Antifia movements now that the Democrats are back in the saddle.

Congratulations on finally finding those “anarchists” Mr Kristof. Only a year behind non-MSM sources.

But even now the Post’s write-up tries to cover for “Black Lives Matter” as if they haven’t been absolutely complicit with Antifa in Portland. Antifa did not hijack a “social justice movement.” They started one hundred nights of rioting designed to smash the Portland police and all existing state authorities, and what we’re seeing is a direct result of that. BLM has rioted, looted, burned, and committed acts of violence in Portland just like those who claim the banner of Antifa. None of these groups get a pass. In fact, there’s essentially no daylight between them, which should never have been a surprise given the Far Left motivations of both groups.

No, the MSM doesn’t get to once again ride in years late on a story and get plaudits when they were the ones who did everything they could to suppress this issue. Only now that things are so thoroughly out of control are the bastards willing to even admit this stuff is happening.

And to think that there are adults, including politicians, who still rely on the MSM.

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