The MSM reflects on the Hur report and itself: Regrets are surfacing

In a WaPo opinion (here not behind paywall) this morning Jennifer Rubin writes, citing, among other things, the Just Security analysis of the Hur report that I posted about yesterday:

Hur’s political hatchet job. Garland’s blunder. Media complicity.

Special counsel Robert K. Hur had a single task: Determine if President Biden illegally retained sensitive documents after his vice presidency. The answer should not have taken nearly 13 months or a more than 300-page report. Hur also should have avoided trashing “the fundamental ethos of a prosecutor to avoid gratuitous smears,” as former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told me.

It was Hur’s gratuitous smear about Biden’s age and memory — most egregiously, his far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son Beau’s death — that transformed a snide report into a political screed. Speculating about how a jury might have perceived the president years after the incidents took place was entirely irrelevant because the lack of evidence meant there would be no case.   

Finally, the media — which made a spectacle of itself hollering at and interrupting Biden in his news conference after the report was released — certainly amplified the GOP talking point. Many outlets failed to explain that there was insufficient evidence of willfulness. For days, headlines focused on the memory smear rather than on Biden’s exoneration. Worse, Sunday news shows misreported the report.

Rubin also rips Merrick Garland for gross incompetence in allowing Hur to smear Biden.

Other MSM sources are now starting to voice similar regrets about how they mishandled the Hur report and allowed him to smear Biden.

Michael Tomasky writing for The New Republic makes important points about the MSM and propaganda that are not raised enough:

The Only Mental Acuity I’m Questioning These Days 

Is the Mainstream Media’s

We’re at a fateful crossroads here. On one road, the Avenue of Responsible Sobriety traveled by the Times and the Post and most of the mainstream media, lies legitimate and necessary dialogue about whether any octogenarian, and this one specifically, is fit to be president. But the other road, the Mad Max Hellscape Expressway, has been taken over by the right-wing media, whose interest is not legitimate dialogue but the utter destruction of the octogenarian in question.

This is not a level playing field, folks. Where these roads meet, the souped-up Hummers of the Hellscape Expressway will overrun the dainty Priuses of Responsibility Avenue.

What’s the greater potential for havoc and destruction of our way of life—the things Biden forgets, or the things Trump remembers? 

I have written what I’m about to write here probably 20 times in the last couple years, and I’ll write it 20 more or 200 more until I see people starting to get the point. In terms of how the American political media works, we have recently crossed a dark Rubicon. We now live in a world, which I believe we entered after January 6, 2021, in which the right-wing media sets the national agenda. The mainstream media follows.

Going way back in time, we had only a mainstream media—the Times and the Post and the Associated Press and the major networks. In the 1970s, after the famous Powell Memo, wealthy conservatives began funding their own media. For most of the last 50 years, even as the right-wing media grew, it remained clear that the mainstream media set the agenda—that is, it determined what we all talked about every day.

But recently, that flipped. This transformation has been in process for several years, but I date it to January 6 for two reasons. First, before that, the right-wing media didn’t have all-consuming power when it came to crunch time. They could not, for example, elect Donald Trump. There was still enough of a shred of news-gathering honesty at Fox News that it called Arizona for Joe Biden. Second, January 6 was a moment of choosing for the American right. Conservative politicians and the right-wing media could have woken up on January 7 and decided that enough was enough, and they were captaining their MAGA-ized spaceship back down to planet Earth.

But we’ve seen how both of those matters sorted themselves out. Fox forced out the two people who made that Arizona call. You think this November Fox will be in the vanguard—it was the first network to give Arizona to Biden—of calling a purple state for the Democrat? It’s inconceivable. And on the second matter, with a few notable exceptions, virtually the whole party now embraces the January 6 “uprising” (or is too cowardly to say otherwise).

The right-wing media has followed suit, giving us a sprawling and enormously powerful messaging apparatus—Fox, Newsmax, One America, all those Sinclair radio and TV stations, Christian radio, most newspapers out there around the country, the majority of prominent opinion journals, most of largest social media personalities, and more—that now sings from the same hymnal. They did before, but January 6 provided that extra kick; the grain alcohol in the punch. It gave these outlets a sense of mission that wasn’t quite so fully and recognizably there before.

Again we see that the DFS (dark free speech) Hummers of the Hellscape Expressway is central to the rise and radicalization of American radical right authoritarianism. Its power and deadly influence are simply undeniable. The weakness of the MSM armed with facts, truths and sound reasoning is just as clear.

If conservative politicians and the right-wing media had woke up on January 7 and decided to pilot their MAGA-ized DFS spaceship back down to planet Earth, I guarantee our democracy, civil liberties and rule of law would not be in such grave danger.

But here we are. Like it or not, DFS is more powerful than facts and truth. The onus is on the truth speakers to do a lot better job than they have been with the constraints they operate under. That should have included not letting the morally rotted authoritarian liar Hur smear Biden.