When a new motion was filed by John Durham on Friday night that included information about Hillary's Clinton's campaign and its activities toward Donald Trump's campaign, the mainstream media largely said "meh" and ignored the development (though Townhall did not, and Vespa's story is here). Well now The New York Times is trying to defend its decision...by insulting its readership.
In what was apparently another example of the mainstream media's selection bias clouding its judgement and causing it not to cover stories that are negative about their pals in the Democrat party, the usual suspects were oddly silent on the development for days. According to analysis from Fox News, on-air coverage of the latest Durham bombshell from Saturday through Monday on ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC totaled zero (0) seconds while CNN gave two minutes and 30 seconds to the story. In primetime, the revelations weren't covered at all.
After President Trump released multiple statements on the revelations, including one pointedly calling out the mainstream media for ignoring more negative allegations against Hillary's campaign, The New York Times finally got around to writing a story days after the news broke, running online on Monday and in Tuesday's print edition.
So what was The Times' excuse? The revelations, according to national security and legal policy correspondent Charlie Savage, "tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time."
So because readers might need to think about what they're consuming from a news outlet rather than just uncritically accepting what an outlet tells them at face value, according to Savage, means "raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims."
Except The New York Times has covered multiple other "developments" in the Durham investigation, of course in stories that undermine the Durham probe. So much for "All the News That's Fit to Print," I guess. And so much for treating readers and subscribers like intelligent people who can read a story and decide for themselves what it means.
Savage's assault on the intelligence of The Times' readers goes on to claim that all the coverage from Townhall and other conservative outlets is bunk, but even that claim doesn't make sense given Monday's White House press briefing in which Karine Jean-Pierre did nothing to cast doubt on the revelations. If the entire narrative around the latest Durham bombshell was fake, wouldn't she have pointed that out instead of saying the White House "can't speak to" the revelations? And if the stories coming from the development were baseless, wouldn't some of the mainstream outlets that remained silent have rushed exculpatory evidence to air in defense of Hillary Clinton and her campaign — including Biden's current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan?
As it turns out, even The Times' piece that seeks to defend Hillary Clinton's campaign and its activities couldn't avoid the shady nature of what Durham's team apparently uncovered. As Savage points out in his piece:
The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann [a Clinton Campaign lawyer] had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.
Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.
It's been a long time since The Gray Lady has been printing anything but "All the News That Fits the Narrative," but a desperate attempt to tamp down questions about what the Clinton campaign was up to after those questions were already being asked in the White House briefing room is not going to quell interest in the latest revelations.
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