Politics

‘What a joke’: Cruz blasts CNN claim that media ‘isn’t lying,’ says mistakes ‘skew 100% in one direction’

January 2, 2022 | | Print Article

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CNN is facing fierce criticism from the public, in addition to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, for having invited a guest on air to claim that the establishment press doesn’t routinely lie to the American people.

The guest was Mara Schiavocampo, a so-called journalist with a history of complaining about “white woman syndrome” and dismissing Hamas’ sometimes deadly rockets attacks on Israel. She appeared last Sunday on purported media critic Brian Stelter’s weekend program, “Reliable Sources.”

As part of the show’s “media mailbag” segment, Schiavocampo was asked why the media screws up so often. She responded by attributing these incessant slip-ups to honest mistakes and claimed it’s a “misconception” to believe the media are purposefully being deceitful or outright lying.

“So the single biggest misconception is that we are lying. There is a lot of media mistrust. I hear this all the time. And here’s what I would love to correct about that misperception. We are human. We make mistakes. So most often when someone says to me the media is lying and they point to an example, what they’re pointing to is an example of a mistake, not an intentional lie,” she said.

“We do not have malicious intent. Most journalists, by and large, take great pride in getting things right. And it’s tremendously shameful to make a mistake, and [we] own up to it very quickly. So if you do see a mistake, it’s generally the result of human error. You’re moving too fast, bad sources, too many cooks in the kitchen. You know, you’re playing a game with telephone.”

Yet nobody at CNN nor virtually any other establishment outlet has displayed an iota of shame over their extremely flawed reporting on Nick Sandman and Kyle Rittenhouse. The reporting on Sandmann was so bad and defamatory that he managed to compel several establishment networks, including CNN, into accepting court settlements.

Continuing the discussion, Stelter agreed with Schiavocampo’s talking points but did ask, “But it’s almost always innocent, right?”

The “almost always” suggests that he knows deep inside that the flawed reporting from the establishment press is, at least at times, rooted in maliciousness.

Schiavocampo responded by blaming the media’s supposed mistakes on the pandemic.

“So especially these days, with a pandemic, and people working in different places, you know, you might have four editors in four different places, and then a typo ends up in a story. And just because of the crazy workflow, you know,” she said.

Sandmann was ruthlessly smeared over a year before the pandemic emerged. Meanwhile, the smearing of former President Donald Trump via the Russian collusion delusion hoax and conspiracy theory began way back in 2016.

To their credit, a few lone voices in the establishment press such as actual media critic Eric Wemple of The Washington Post have sought to hold the wider media industrial complex accountable for the Russia smear.

For the most part, however, there’s been dead silence. And so given this, given the smearing of Sandmann and Rittenhouse, and given that the media’s errors invariably go in one direction (one that hurts Republicans and benefits Democrats), many were left beyond unconvinced by Schiavocampo’s arguments.

Cruz, a Republican, was among the critics:

Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist famous for helping dissident Edward Snowden expose the NSA’s illegal surveillance operations, has long accused establishment media figures of lacking self-awareness.

This lack of self-awareness is why, he’s argued, the media so often behave hypocritically by, as an example, capriciously destroying people’s lives with smears but turning around and crying “harassment” whenever they’re merely criticized.

Notorious smear merchant Taylor Lorenz of The New York Times is a perfect example of this phenomenon:

As for CNN, Greenwald recently noted that for a network that purports to tell the truth, CNN sure does enjoy working with (and even hiring) pathological liars:

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Vivek Saxena
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