The almost exclusively one-sided nature of American political coverage by Danish media shouldn’t only concern Danish or American conservatives. Anybody interested in the truth should be concerned when only one side of every story is told.
If all you ever hear about American politics, government, culture, and economics is stuff that reflects well on the left and poorly on the right, then you’re obviously getting an incomplete or distorted picture, putting you in no position to draw conclusions of your own. You may feel you’re aware of American affairs, you may believe you’re well-informed and that your opinions are built on a solid empirical foundation, but you’re obviously not.
(If you actually believe there is nothing good about the American right, or anything bad about the American left, then you’re hopeless—just as you would be if you believed the opposite.)
If you’re an adult with a capacity for independent thinking, you ought to welcome all the facts you can get your hands on.
With that in mind, have a look at Mollie Hemingway’s recent (July 23) article in the Federalist, “New FBI Notes Re-Debunk Major NYT Story, Highlight Media Collusion To Produce Russia Hoax.”
The Federalist is a conservative website co-founded by Hemingway, who is herself a conservative. She has also been among the most unrelenting chroniclers of the extent to which the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and most American media fabricated and then promoted the “Russia Collusion” story that dominated American politics right up until COVID-19 knocked everything else out of the headlines.
The many facts ticked off in her article are just that: facts. And most of them are facts that few Americans, and still fewer Danes, are aware of, because the American media have largely ignored them (for good reason, given their own complicity) and the Danish media rely so heavily on the American media for their story selection.
In the the judicial proceedings of most constitutional countries, the prosecution’s deliberate withholding of exculpatory evidence is a crime. There are pretty good reasons for that. Journalists are not held to any such standard, and there are pretty good reasons for that, too.
With that in mind: which of the following Obama administration officials stated under oath that they had never seen evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, or FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe?
The answer is all of them. Every single one of them swore under oath in 2017, behind closed doors, that they had not seen and were not aware of any actual evidence of such collusion. We only learned of this in May of this year.
That’s interesting, especially when you consider what the same people were saying in public. For example, have a look at this October 2017 Clapper interview on PBS Frontline:
Here’s what he says at about the 19:15 mark (which I’ve tried to embed in the link):
I will just say that for me, the evidence was overwhelming, and that’s why the intelligence community assessment had such high confidence levels with the team that we put together. There are two dozen or so expert analysts from the three agencies and my office who were involved in this, all of whom came with lots of experience and understanding of Russia, and they were unanimous in their view on what had transpired. Now, when all that will be revealed, I don’t know, but I hope it’s sometime away, because we are still depending on those techniques and accesses for information, for intelligence.
So you’ve got a National Director of Intelligence saying in public that “for me, the evidence was overwhelming,” while under oath (and therefore under penalty of perjury) he says, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
How can evidence be “overwhelming” without being “direct empirical evidence?”
Rice, Power, Lynch, and McCable, among others, pulled the same neat sleight of hand, publicly insisting on the existence of rock-solid evidence while conceding under oath there was none.
What they did is not a crime. They spoke the truth under oath, as the law requires, and they lied to the cameras, as the law allows. That’s just politics.
But why is it that only conservative American media, and no Danish media I’m aware of, have thought it perhaps newsworthy that Obama’s inner sanctum of advisers, the men and women and the helm of our ship of state, were publicly perpetuating such a dangerously inflammatory story while behind closed doors they were conceding they had no evidence?
You’d think a news organization that believes “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” or one that calls itself “The Most Trusted Name in News” would want their readers and viewers to know that the politicians who were saying one thing in public, when they weren’t under oath, said precisely the opposite when to lie would have been a crime.
Mollie Hemingway is one of the few American journalists who actually seems interested in answering such questions–or at least in sharing the answers with the public. You don’t need to agree with her politics, and you’re free to draw whatever conclusions you like from the facts she presents. But you cannot get your head around what’s going on in American politics if you’re not aware of the facts that she and a small handful of others continue bringing to light.
And once you’re aware of such facts, you might wonder, as so many of us do, why the dogs of the established media aren’t barking about them.