How Many More Lies Will We Let Them Get Away With?

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, goes the old saying. So what does it mean when the public let the mainstream media fool them again and again and again?

Shame on them both.

The mainstream media are no longer bothering with just bending the truth: they’re lying. Openly, blatantly, and repeatedly. And their audiences willingly swallow the lies, because it’s what they want.

They can’t just not handle the truth, they don’t want the truth.

Consider some of the biggest media narratives of the past few years: Russian collusion, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, Brian Williams’s helicopter in Iraq, Dan Rather’s fake G W Bush documents: these were all lies, the mainstream media knew they were lies, they got caught knowingly lying. But did they stop? Let alone show an ounce of shame or contrition.

Of course not. They just moved on to the next lie.

It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

Two days after the riot, the New York Times (whose lies go at least as far back as lying about the Stalinist famine in the 1930s) published a shocking and absolutely fake report that Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed with a fire extinguisher by Trump supporters, until he died. The rest of the mainstream media jumped on the lying bandwagon and shouted the lie, over and over again.

As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.

But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was (without Sicknick, the only ones killed were four pro-Trump supporters: two who died of a heart attack, one from an amphetamine overdose, and the other, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot point blank in the neck by Capitol Police despite being unarmed). So crucial was this fairy tale about Sicknick that it made its way into the official record of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, and they had Joe Biden himself recite from the script, even as clear facts mounted proving it was untrue.

Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as “Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.

But no matter how hard the mainstream media lie, the truth will out – if anyone bothers to listen.

The District of Columbia’s chief medical examiner earlier this morning issued his official ruling in the Sicknick case, and it was so definitive that The Washington Post — one of the media outlets that had pushed the multiple falsehoods — did not even bother to try to mask or mitigate the stark conclusion it revealed:

The first line tells much of the story: “Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes a day after he confronted rioters at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the District’s chief medical examiner has ruled”[…]

Francisco J. Diaz, the medical examiner, said the autopsy found no evidence the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants, which Diaz said would have caused Sicknick’s throat to quickly seize. Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries.

Glenn Greenwald

Which definitively lays to rest the media’s backup lie: that Trump supporters killed Sicknick with “bear spray”.

Remember: this is the same mainstream media babbling about a “post-truth world” and blaming Donald Trump for it.

They are liars without shame, lying for profit. Far from “speaking truth to power”, they ardently and repeatedly tell lies for power.

And their partisan, bigoted, “liberal” audiences happily swallow it all. Liars are bad enough: people who want to be lied to are even worse.

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