Confirmation bias: Brett Kavanaugh and the major media's worst moment

Washington Examiner  "For all the recent talk about facts versus “fake news,” telling the truth, and recapturing the public's trust in the era of President Trump, some of our most important newsrooms blew it when it mattered most. Worse still, some demonstrated an immediate willingness to trade this industry's already badly battered reputation for a political victory.

Ian Macfarlane

"We are now at the unsuccessful conclusion of a four-week-long effort by certain media organizations to prove Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a violent sexual predator and a lying alcoholic. The reckless and grossly irresponsible scramble by the New Yorker, NBC News, the New York Times, and others to make Kavanaugh into a monster produced some of the worst journalism of the Trump era to date – and that's a pretty high bar.

"There were plenty of minor fouls, including when the Times assigned a news story on Kavanaugh to a magazine opinion writer who openly opposed his nomination. Others were much greater, including when NBC published an anonymously written letter alleging (with zero corroboration) that Kavanaugh was observed by an anonymous woman in 1998 to have pushed another anonymous woman.

"Journalists make mistakes, of course. But had all of the sloppy and often unethical reporting on Kavanaugh been the product of mere negligence or human error, the law of averages suggests that some of the errors would have been in his favor. None of them were. From great to small, they all tried to prove Kavanaugh unfit to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. It would be hard to blame a viewer or reader who concluded that these newsrooms acted not as the gatekeepers of truth, but as willing agents in the Democratic Party’s 11th-hour effort to destroy the judge’s good name, along with his chances of becoming the swing vote on the Supreme Court.

"It began on Sept. 12. The Intercept’s Ryan Grim first reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., possessed a confidential letter alleging an “incident” between Kavanaugh and a woman “while they were in high school.” Soon after the publication of the Intercept report, Feinstein referred the secret letter to the FBI." . . . Full article...

Life and death in the fake news business

Personal Liberty

" . . .this president has to go, and your assignment is to keep cutting him, it’s beyond the point where anybody in your business cares who he is and what he’s done and what he’s doing, so pump up the hysteria, shove in the blade wherever you can, THIS is how your success will be measured, you want a light to shine on you, so attack, attack without letup, don’t think, don’t think about what’s going on here, the important thing is:

"The news business is: careers.

"Having a career is life. Losing it is death.

"Your career is on the line." . . .

 Again: Ashley Kavanaugh Should Sue Christine Blasey Ford

. . . "A worryingly large number of people seem to think the War on Brett Kavanaugh is over now that he’s Justice Kavanaugh.

"It’s not.

"Another phase of it is just starting – and going by the continued assaults on Justice Thomas, it is not a phase that will end before Justice Kavanaugh’s death. As the Democrat-aligned POLITICO reports; “Democrats Not Giving Up Kavanaugh War”.

. . . This will stop the moment it becomes clear that Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, Julie Swetnick, Ronan Farrow, Jane Mayer, Kasie Hunt, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Heidi Przybyla, Frank Thorp, Kate Snow, etc. and their editors are faced with the very real prospect of a proper no-holds barred cross-examination in a courtroom.I guarantee that the very same people gleefully issuing dark warnings about House Democrats launching their own “investigation” of the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh will turn on a dime to complain about the Kavanaughs refusing to be “gracious in victory”, and scream that it is time to let bygones be bygonee and “move on.”These are people of bad faith and they deserve nothing but contempt. . . .

Matt Nuskind