Every day I find myself greatly bemused and also appalled at people who continue to refer to the MSM for news, opinion, “facts” and so forth.

My bemusement continues when people who really should know better express surprise about how they’ve been lied to – but then refuse to extend that new knowledge into other areas.

One such person is Uber Lefty Andrew Sullivan, an Englishmen who immigrated to America decades ago and is best known for his unflagging promotion of gay marriage in the USA, with a now much-regretted sidebar into supporting the invasion of Iraq. That last caused him to support GW Bush for a while, but he managed to clean his blotted copybook by going all in on Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then becoming one of the slightly less unhinged members of the NeverTrump brigade. Less well known was his definitely unhinged hatred of the Mini-Me Trump, Sarah Palin, a decade earlier; he was convinced that her last baby was actually the child of one of her daughters and he pursued that conspiracy theory relentlessly.

Never has any gay man been so obsessed with a woman’s vagina!

So, like all of us, he has flaws. But he’s been involved with the MSM for decades now and so knows of what he speaks when he says, When All The Media Narratives Collapse:

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the “narratives” that have proven wrong – and they all go in one direction, so we’re not talking about mistakes:

  • The Rittenhouse case
  • The Antifa/BLM riots
  • The Steele dossier
  • The Covington boys
  • The Covid lab-leak theory
  • The Jussie Smollett case
  • The fake rape allegations at University of Virginia
  • The Pulse mass shooting motivation
  • The Atlanta spa shooting motivation
  • Responsibility for the increased attacks on Asian-Americans
  • The Wi Spa exposure
  • The source of the Hunter Biden e-mails
  • Officer Sicknick’s death
  • Reporting on border crossings
  • The denial of critical race theory being taught, when it permeates everywhere
  • Vaccines and Covid-19

Just a quick note on that link about the BLM/Antifa riots: it’s a specific one about the Kenosha riots that led to the Rittenhouse case and it details a story that has just emerged from a former NYT reporter who was sent to the town, but whose story was pulled:

A note on Kenosha in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial: until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.

When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.

Of course they pulled the story – until after the election. The reporter does not say why, she treats the refusal to run the piece as a bit of a mystery, but to anyone who is not a Democrat the reason is pretty obvious: it would have hurt Biden and the Democrats to see the sort of people they were implicitly defending by attacking Rittenhouse as a White Supremacist and vigilante.

But here’s the thing: knowing what he now knows about the lies and deceit of the MSM, Sullivan is still not willing to explore the “Narrative” behind the reporting of the 2020 US election and the January 6 “Insurrection”.

Those are his narratives, and that’s not a Rubicon he’s willing to cross.

Yet.

Oh, and this…