Is the Media Irredeemably Dishonest?

CLAY: There’s a bevy of stories for us to dive into. But I want to hit you with a bevy of fake news, as Donald Trump would say. I also want to let you know about a big ruling out of the Fifth Circuit that dropped on Friday night. We’ll talk a little bit about the legal implications of the ruling, which was a slapdown — incredible, incredible ruling from the Fifth Circuit — saying that the vaccine mandate implemented by Joe Biden through OSHA is unconstitutional for a variety of reasons.

I hope that other circuit courts will also adopt the same perspective. But in the meantime, Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate on the legal ropes. But we haven’t talked a ton about the Steele dossier being completely wiped out as a legitimate basis for news. After five years, it’s pretty wild to think about. After five years of trumpeting this all throughout the Washington Post — Democracy Dies in Darkness and all that jazz.

The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN… Buck, MSNBC and CNN have barely acknowledged in any way that the Steele dossier is now a complete fabrication. The Washington Post wrote a mea culpa. Same thing happened for Axios. But Andrew Sullivan had a good piece that he tweeted out that said, “When All the Media Narratives Collapse,” and he listed all these different things.

I know a lot of our audience experienced the failure of the media on these stories, but when you see them all lined up one after the other, it’s pretty crazy. In the 2016 election, the media said Hillary Clinton was gonna triumph. When she didn’t, they blamed Russia collusion. Kyle Rittenhouse, right now it appears that he’s very likely to not be found guilty.

The media told you that he was a racist white supremacist hell-bent on committing murder. Covington Catholic kid, Nicholas Sandmann on the front steps? The vaccines and the fact that they were highly effective? That certainly has blown up as we’ve been telling you for months on this show. The lab leak theory was unacceptable to suggest that covid came out of a lab leak. Now seemed like it did, Jussie Smollett, the Atlanta shootings, Hunter Biden’s laptop, inflation, the Steele dossier.

These are just some of them. The mainstream media got all of these stories wrong, Buck. And not only did they get them wrong, they lectured all of us who asked any questions about them and said we were spreading disinformation, misinformation, that we should have our abilities to talk to our audience restricted.

BUCK: I wonder where Andrew Sullivan was during some of these. I’m just gonna say that. As much as I like when people come to the truth, so I don’t ever want to be… You know, there was somebody before it a very far left, Young Turks who came out and said, “You know, I was wrong about Rittenhouse.” So I never want to be that person that pounces on people. You arrive at the truth? Okay, good.

But I do have a frustration here, Clay, as you’re reading that stuff out. Andrew Sullivan does a lot of good work on different issues. Here’s a liberal or sometimes he’s honest — or he seems to be honest, I should say — on most issues. But this stuff was obvious. I did a podcast the first week of the Jussie Smollett case where the title was “Jussie Smollett Is Lying.” Everyone’s saying, “Oh, it’s crazy what happened to him and it’s awful!” I’m like, “There’s no way it happened.”

CLAY: Yeah. Kamala said it was a lynching, a hate crime. She’s an idiot, but that’s what she tweeted.

BUCK: And the same time, remember there was that moral panic over “noose” all over the country and it kept being found out, “Oh, it was a rope someone was using at a tree in a park for exercise equipment,” or, “Oh, it was a door pull at a garage.”

CLAY: At NASCAR, after all the stories, yes.

BUCK: We’re going through something akin to a leftist cultural revolution, a Maoist cultural revolution where independent thought, asking questions, trying to be a free thinker — and also trying to be accountable for what’s true and what’s not and what you say. Because all that’s going on right now — and they want to stop people from doing “accountability,” in their words — what are we supposed to take from this?

The media has been consistently wrong on huge issues in the same direction not because of honest mistakes. That’s their alibi and it’s bull crap. It’s because they are activists, and it’s because the Democrat-corporate media… The same way that Democrats control 90% plus of all the faculty lounges and universities, the same way they control Netflix and they control the Hollywood studios before that.

They control 95% of the corporate-owned media, at least, and they’re running an agenda all the time. ‘Cause the numbers don’t add up otherwise right? You would at least get something wrong at some point that was favorable to the right. Never happens. It doesn’t occur. It’s a statistical impossibility that what’s going on here is not intentional. But when you realize it’s intentional, then you know what we’re dealing with, which is a bunch of ruthless commies pushing propaganda like the New York Times, CNN, et cetera.

CLAY: What’s so funny about that, Buck, is I’ve made that argument and it leaves everybody speechless. I just say, “Hey, you’re right. Maybe the media is not biased. Tell me about all the great stories that ended up not being true that painted Donald Trump in a more flattering light.” You can’t even point to one! You would think if you were just haphazard and frequently wrong in your analysis… Has CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, or the New York Times ever had a flattering and incorrect article about Donald Trump that benefited him that we later found out was untrue? I can’t even think of one.

BUCK: There isn’t one. It’s not even that we —

CLAY: That’s how crazy that is.

BUCK: I would go as far as to say it just didn’t happen, right? It’s not even like we could find one or two that maybe, you know, creates a little bit more dissonance in this argument. This is a 100% proposition because you could never get that through a newsroom because here’s the real issue, Clay. It isn’t that they may never stumble on to news that might be favorable to the right.

They would never print news that is favorable to the right that was not an absolute necessity, right? I mean, unless it’s the jobs numbers looking good and they know they can’t get away with fabricating it. Unless it’s something that’s impossible for them to effectively cheat on through editorializing in a way that favors one side, it won’t happen. That’s the way the system is set up.

And so when we tell people out there you cannot trust them, we’re not saying this without reason. We’re not saying this without justification for it based on how they conduct themselves. These news entities are operating in a realm of lies. They lie about being unbiased, they lie about holding themselves accountable constantly — and that is actually now their mission statement.

They started to slip a little bit and even say it during the Trump era where the truth was anti-Trump. They come up with these very frightening, authoritarian-sounding slogans. You know, “speech we don’t like is violence,” “the truth is anti-Trump.” You say, hold on a second. That doesn’t sound like what a free society should be adhering to.

CLAY: It’s also important, Buck, to distinguish all the things that we just ran through were reported as fact, not opinion. And I feel much of the challenge that we have in American media right now is over a failure oftentimes to distinguish between fact and opinion. All of those things that were shared were allegations mostly of fact, right?

If somebody watches the Kyle Rittenhouse trial right now and writes a piece, “I think Kyle Rittenhouse should be found guilty; here are four things that happened in the trial that make me believe that,” that’s an opinion piece. You can agree or disagree with it, but it’s founded on what’s actually taken place in the trial itself.

When you say the Steele dossier is accurate, like Adam Schiff said for years and is justification underlying for Donald Trump’s removal from office and then it all is found to be untrue, it destroys the factual basis of the claim but then also every opinion base that was rooted in that case, which is a huge portion of overall discussion — hours and hours of falsehoods — and many people still don’t know that it’s fake news.

BUCK: And isn’t it fascinating that at the same time where we have seen more open and egregious falsehoods from the biggest news organizations in America that are Democrat aligned, right? CNN, New York Times, Washington Post — go down the list, all of them — MSNBC, NBC News, ABC News. At the same time when you see that happening, you also have a shift in journalism — quote-unquote, “journalism” — to, “We need to shut down ideas we don’t like. We need people to be banned from Twitter who say things about masks that we disagree with! We need to shutdown questions about vaccines.”

CLAY: Fox News shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast.

BUCK: What?

CLAY: ‘Fox News shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast.” That’s an argument that has been made.

BUCK: This is… They want their opponents to be shut up because in a free market of ideas, these people look like the liars and the jackasses that they are, and they all have both very big and fragile egos at the same time. It’s a remarkable thing about lib journos.

CLAY: No doubt.