30 Oct: American Spectator: The American media is failing you
Journalism has become partisan promotion
by Charles Lipson, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security
Except for Fox News, all the major TV networks and national newspapers adopted the Russia collusion narrative and drove it forward. They relied almost entirely on leaked stories from anonymous sources, deeply opposed to Trump, mostly at the FBI and CIA, plus some Democrats on Capitol Hill. The main drivers were James Comey and Andrew McCabe at the FBI, John Brennan and James Clapper at the intelligence agencies and Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. They not only got a Special Counsel appointed but got him free rein. Robert Mueller’s prolonged investigation, managed by his deputy, Andrew Weissmann, hamstrung the presidency and helped the Democrats win the House in 2018.
All this time, Schiff was a media darling, repeating his claim that he had proof positive that Trump actively worked with the Kremlin. In fact, Schiff was sitting on secret testimony, given by all Obama’s top officials in national security and law enforcement. Under oath, all of them said they had no evidence of Trump working with Russia. Schiff knew that, of course, but he repeatedly told the press the opposite...
Failure #2: The media failed to investigate spying on Trump...
We won’t know the full story until US Attorney John Durham issues indictments and perhaps publishes a report. But we already know the main elements and, once again, we know the mainstream media missed it completely. What is that story? It is that the Obama administration used the most powerful tools of intelligence and law enforcement to spy on an opposition political campaign and impede the transition of power...
Looming Failure #3: Refusing to investigate Biden family corruption...
There are now three separate sets of damning documents covering overlapping scandals. One is Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’, abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The second is a cache of some 27,000 emails to and from Bevan Cooney, one of Hunter Biden’s disgruntled ex-business partners. The third and most recent is another cache of documents plus an extensive, on-the-record TV interview with Tony Bobulinski, an international business executive and another of Hunter’s former partners...
Whether Tony Bobulinski’s story ultimately pans out or not, the allegations and supporting documents are big news, worthy of serious investigation and reporting. Or, rather, they should be. So should the Delaware laptop and the Cooney emails. In fact, there is almost complete media silence about all of them. The laptop story was reported only by the New York Post, which was then locked out of its Twitter account for daring to share a link to its own cover story. Except for Fox News, The Spectator, the Wall Street Journal and some conservative blogs, the laptop story has received almost no follow-up coverage.
What happened to the Bobulinski story is even more amazing. There is an almost-complete mainstream media blackout, except for Fox News, which aired the hour-long interview with Bobulinski. Sinclair News has begun to do some follow-up. Of course, conservative media are consumed with it. Meanwhile, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN refuse to even mention it. A search for ‘Bobulinski’ on the CNN website (on October 30 at 4:15 a.m.) shows ‘Your search for Bobulinski did not match any documents.’...
The latest victim of this blackout is Glenn Greenwald, a prominent reporter on intelligence issues who formerly worked for the Guardian before co-founding a prominent website, the Intercept. Greenwald drafted a major article on these and other Biden problems for the Intercept, but the editors refused to publish it unless he deleted all criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate. Rather than do that, Greenwald resigned (for reasons he explains here) and published the article on his newly-launched Substack (here)...
Since nobody bothers to ask hard questions, the Biden team hasn’t even been forced to deny the accusations. It certainly hasn’t volunteered any details. The Biden campaign has never said the Delaware computer and the documents on it are fake, for example. They haven’t said anything about the Cooney emails. And they have completely avoided comments on Bobulinski’s devastating accusations...
These are the same folks who eagerly reported the most salacious, unverified accusations against Donald Trump from Christopher Steele’s dossier, based only on FBI leaks and a PR campaign from Hillary Clinton’s operatives. They seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as Talleyrand once said of France’s Bourbon monarchy...
https://spectator.us/american-media-failing-russiagate-obamagate-hunter-biden/
The press is digging it's own grave...