Tipsheet

Partisan 'Experts' Can't Stop Destroying Whatever Credibility They Have Left

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  February 28, 2023 10:25 AM

A follow-up to yesterday's post, the themes of which I've been thinking about quite a lot in the last few weeks, for obvious reasons.  In short, as I've been saying frequently, our elite societal arbiters of 'truth' are too often proven wrong by subsequent events and evidence -- raising questions about whether they're incapable of accounting for blindspots, or worse, just attempting to impose their own political and ideological preferences as 'facts' while disqualifying differing viewpoints.  My suspicion is that it's a combination of both phenomena, each of which undermines public faith in 'fact checkers' and 'experts.'  They lack public faith because they have squandered public faith, repeatedly.  I made this point at some length on-air:


It's the media, yes, but also the 'Science' crowd, including you-know-who:


Part of the problem is the media's citation of "experts" who have spotty records for accuracy in some cases, or who are hysterical partisans in others.  Consider, for instance, how often news outlets launder journalists' collective leftist worldview through supposed authorities who agree with them.  And yes, before we go any further, the group ideology of the journo class can be broadly categorized as leftist:


Here's one "expert" the press loves to quote:


And here's a representative example of her 'expertise' at work:

Recommended

Watch Scott Jennings Slap Down This Shoddy Talking Point About the Spending Bill Matt Vespa
Biden Was Too 'Mentally Fatigued' to Take Call From Top Committee Chair Before Afghanistan Withdrawal Sarah Arnold


Trump is an unique threat to the republic, you see -- but DeSantis is actually even more "dangerous," of course, due to the "deadly precision" with which he'll "destroy our democracy."  This type of hyperventilation might be typical of a deeply deranged, foaming-at-the-mouth former cable news host, but this woman is passed off as some sort of neutral expert.  Her predictable, hyperbolic partisanship is cringeworthy, but it's especially embarrassing for any journalist who prints her assessments as if they're anything other than unhinged internet comments section fodder.  But that's how this racket works: The journos try to bestow credibility upon non-credible actors by labeling them as experts, whose views just so happen to align with their own.  Then we have 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' watchdogs who blithely offer declarations like this:


This person accused Tom Cotton of being akin to Soviet propagandists lying about AIDS, even though Cotton has been vindicated.  When she got called out for being egregiously unfair and wrong, she blocked the people pointing out her track record.  This is the same individual, by the way:

The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum insisted the ongoing Hunter Biden laptop saga didn’t interest her because she didn't see how his "business relationships have anything to do with who should be president," but the liberal writer had no issues with the importance of Donald Trump Jr.’s affairs. "My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think, totally irrelevant. I me"an, it’s not whether it’s disinformation," Applebaum said during a "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy" conference this past week at the University of Chicago, when she was asked about the media's refusal to cover the laptop story when it first broke in 2020. "I mean, I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it to be interesting," she continued. "I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story." ...While the liberal writer declared the Hunter Biden saga fails to interest her, she was more-than-willing to discuss the previous president’s son. 

She didn't find Hunter Biden's foreign business entanglements, which allegedly involved his father (despite his father's alleged lies on the subject), to be "interesting" or "relevant," and therefore the issue was not a major news story, in her estimation. But she was highly invested in Donald Trump, Jr.'s meeting with a Russian woman, for instance (remember this detail?), in relation to the debunked "collusion" narrative, which was pushed extremely hard by the media for years. Members of the press who bear-hugged the false 'Russian collusion' story also embraced the 'Russian disinformation' claims about Hunter Biden's laptop, from yet more "experts," who also turned out to be dead wrong -- but not before quite a lot of election-meddling censorship took place.  And when challenged on it after the whole affair unraveled, they continued with their sneering and gaslighting and revisionism. These are the same people who wring their hands about "conspiracy theories" and "misinformation" in our politics, entirely unwilling to even fleetingly acknowledge their own infamous contributions to the problems they lament.  

I'll leave you with the Washington Post editorial board echoing a bogus, belated, partisan Biden/Buttigieg attack line regarding the East Palestine train derailment, which had been swatted down by careful reporting from National Review, as well as the assessment of an actual expert within Biden's own executive bureaucracy:


Perhaps the Washington Post's editors should check in with their own newspaper's in-house fact-checker:


The White House and the Transportation Secretary invented a nonsense excuse to try to blame their own poor response to a disaster on the previous administration. It took them days to settle on the lie. And a major newspaper's editors ran with the lie, even though their 'fact checker' colleagues came to a different, actually fact-based, conclusion. Slow clap. Say, are WaPo's editors among those who bleat plaintively about "misinformation"?  Of course they are.  I'll leave you with this.  It never ends: