Der Spiegel, CNN and the NY Times

Hat tip John


"We have a situation."


It's been a rough couple of months for CNN, which  advertises itself as the "Most Trusted Name in News".

First, they fired commentator Marc Lamont Hill, who went before the UN and defended the violence of the Palestinians against Israelis while invoking that cute little refrain: "From the River to the Sea-Palestine will be free", which essentially means no more Israel and no more Jews. Shortly before that, another favored commentator, Stormy Daniels lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who CNN had made a rock star, quietly disappeared from the cable news channel after he was charged with beating up a young woman in Los Angeles.

Now it has been revealed that the man they named "Journalist of the Year", Der Spiegel writer Claas Relotius, had been writing stories in which he basically made it all up. The German weekly has now fired Relotius.

But all is not lost. Now another news outlet with an exaggerated reputation, the New York Times, has put the proper liberal spin on this latest embarrassment. Blame conservatives, who are now "popping the corks" on both sides of the Atlantic with "untruths and half truths" as they work to discredit the mainstream media.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/world/europe/der-spiegel-claas-relotius.html

Note the labels that the Times throws in. While Der Spiegel is "Germany's most respected news magazine", the Alternatif fuer Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party is "far right". I would beg to differ. AfD is a new party in Germany founded in opposition to Angela Merkel's insane immigration policy, which has made the country downright dangerous and brimming with extremist Salafist Muslims.

In addition, the Times, which has long enjoyed the overblown reputation as America's flagship newspaper, has long had its own problems with the truth. They have become little more than a propaganda arm for the Democrat party. As the article above itself points out, the Times had its own version of Claas Relotius in a reporter named Jason Blair, who was also found to have made up stories in 2003. More recently, below is a piece I did back in September on how the Times was treating the (on-going) problem of anti-semitism at Rutgers University.

https://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-rutgers-case-and-ny-times.html

The Times can bemoan the rise of social media vis-a-vis mainstream media all it wants. If the former is guilty of dealing in opinion-based writing, which is occasionally erroneous, misguided or downright false (on both sides of the political spectrum), the latter is also guilty. The public is increasingly aware of this, and that is why the mainstream media is in such decline.