You do not need to bother yourself with thinking, comrades. WaPo will do that for you.
Yes, that is a real headline.
If you want video evidence of an event, you are a Q-Anon MAGA Gang extremist, I guess!
Here's the deal: The story about Paul Pelosi wrestling a dude in his home last week went viral because, well, two guys wrestling with hammers on the floor at 2am is weird enough, but the Dems wanted to use it to somehow link to right-wing Ultra-MAGA violence, so they kept it in the headlines.
The police report had some discrepancies, but then we learned that all the security cameras around Nancy and Paul Pelosi's heavily-fortified home (she's second in line to the presidency, y'all) were offline during the attack like the ones in Epstein's cell.
The mainstream media started telling us not to ask questions while also telling us this was an example of how democracy will die unless we vote Democrat, which led to the predictable Streisand effect across the internet.
Media: "Stop paying attention to this story! Also, it's very important!"
When that strategy predictably drew more theories and memes, the media pivoted to the "don't ask questions" tactic employed by the slightly-more-virtuous dictators and crime families around the world.
From WaPo:
Suggesting that authorities are lying has been an audience-builder since the days of UFO chatter on AM radio. But now it's also a central component of the right's worldview. If officials say it, it's a lie, the thinking goes — particularly if those officials can be in any way tied to the political left.
- Just a few weeks ago, a woman pulled a major hoax about racial slurs at a Brigham Young volleyball game.
- Jussie Smollett lied about getting attacked with a noose by Trump supporters.
- We were told someone tried to lynch NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace.
- We were all told the Covid vaccines stopped transmission and that this justified excommunicating the unvaxxed from polite society.
- Rolling Stone turned the entire world upside down for a few weeks with the UVA rape story.
- Congress spent millions investigating the fake Russia-collusion claims against Donald Trump.
- The mainstream media widely celebrated a lawyer representing a porn star accusing Trump of sordid affairs in a case that has now been thrown out as the lawyer now sits in prison for being a verified criminal.
- A Supreme Court justice nominee had his name dragged through the mud on international TV by a woman who couldn't remember any details of her sexual assault charges and had zero corroboration.
- We were meant to believe that J6 rioters killed a bunch of police officers and a horned Viking nearly overthrew the government.
- And then there's the aforementioned Epstein.
Are you seriously telling us that we just need to "Trust The Narrative"?
Do they have a single freaking journalist over there at WaPo???
"DeMoCrAcY diEs wHeN yOu tHiNk fOr yOuRseLF."
On Tuesday evening, The Washington Post reported that the Capitol Police had a live feed of the Pelosi couple's San Francisco house during the attack but that no one was monitoring the feed. In short order, a new demand emerged: Release that video! Release the video of the responding police officers! What are you hiding?! Because this is how the conspiracy theory continues to ooze forward. There's always some information out there being suspiciously hidden that will prove the conspiracy theory correct. If that information is suppressed, it reinforces the conspiracy theory. If it is released, it becomes evidence that contributes to the conspiracy theory — colored yarn is pinned to it — or attention just turns to some other just-out-of-sight information.
There was once a man from Nazareth that said "the truth will set you free," WaPo.
Instead of worrying how people will twist facts to their own benefit, why not let the facts actually come out so that you don't fall victim to your own conspiracy theories?
These dummies genuinely believe that hiding the truth makes society a better place.
As an employee of a newspaper, I would, in fact, like to see the video that the Capitol Police overlooked, and the body-cam footage. It is the media's job to question authority and to ensure accountability. It is also the media's job to present accurate information to the public and to stamp out misinformation. So while seeing that footage would be useful, there is not at this point any reason to believe that the attack on Paul Pelosi was anything other than what various legal documents have suggested.
No, it's not the media's job to "stamp out misinformation."
It is the media's job to faithfully report the facts. The people are then free to decide for themselves, based on the evidence, what is true. Generally, they come to the right conclusion!
Heaven help you if you had a jury made of woke journalists.
"Well, there's no reason to think that you're innocent, and we wouldn't want that 'misinformation' to get out, so we won't even consider the video evidence that might prove you're innocent. We'll just quote some obscure academic about about why transparency is a bad thing and send you off to jail for the common good."
I frequently come back to Lawrence Lessig's 2009 essay "Against Transparency" in which he warned that publishing information in the interests of governmental transparency would simply give people scads of material to generate their own narratives.
There it is.
More transparency and more information are good when considered responsibly. The challenge is that one can no more control how that information is applied than the people who, say, write magazine articles scrutinized for patterns of numbers by the corkboard set can control getting looped into a delusion.
"One can no more control how that information is applied."
That right there is the heart of what the media is worried about: CONTROL.
