There is no news today

This would have been an upgrade on today’s mainstream Mueller Report coverage.

The media failed, and they are determined to ensure it never happens again. Not the failing part, just the part where you find out about it.

With morbid fascination, I watched CNN today. All my former TV pals were there: Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, even Jeffrey Toobin! It felt like I was attending some sort of messed-up class of 2016 reunion. They all dutifully pretended that the non-news event of the century was actually still a thing.

There was one moment in particular that caught my attention. It was in the midst of a discussion about Attorney General Barr’s press conference that addressed the Mueller Report.

CNN legal analyst Laura Coates declared that Barr was guilty of an “Oprah moment [by considering] the feelings of the President of the United States.” Everyone else chirped in that Barr was being favourable to the President, and how preposterous it was that Barr would refer to what then President-elect Trump faced as “unprecedented.” And besides, who cares about the feelings of the President?

They were referring to this moment when Barr quite effectively shut down a reporter for suggesting he was being “generous to the President.” When in fact he was being factually correct and conveying Mueller’s findings, not expressing an opinion.

You see, accurate descriptions are not very popular at CNN these days. It crystallized, for me, what the mainstream media has become—obsessed, craven, hoax-peddlers. And it didn’t have to be this way. As I’ve noted before, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to resist Trump and his policies. It’s almost as if they are too far gone to ever come back.

Trump just has this uncanny knack of making his enemies look foolish. To celebrate the Mueller release, Trump tweeted a Game of Thrones meme because of course he did.

It was the perfect moment for proud resister Judd Legum to pounce. “Innocent people don’t need memes,” he tweeted. A-ha! Now you’ve got him! Wait. What?

This is the kind of unnecessary and mortifying self-own that the anti-Trump crowd has become famous for. Again, it doesn’t have to be this way. You’re never going to out-troll the world’s greatest troll. Maybe find another way to resist?

I am not a Trump fan at all, and I don’t believe he is trustworthy. If I lived in the States, I would vote for a third party liberal or progressive option. But after watching CNN this morning, I have concluded that he is more trustworthy than the mainstream media.

Further, we should not lose sight of the fact that western governments, social media giants, and activists seem to be locked in to an alliance to censor, deplatform, and unperson anyone willing to speak the truth about them.

Now that it has been established once and for all that Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia, that means the unexpected results of the 2016 election were the result of citizens in a free society making a choice for themselves.

Perhaps this is why Facebook wants to protect you from “harmful content,” Twitter wants a “healthy conversation,” activists want “safe spaces,” and politicians (very desperately) want to “safeguard” future elections.

Just today in Great Britain, the Facebook accounts of many far-right groups and individuals were permanently banned. Similar measures were recently taken in Canada and the United States. And we’ve already seen how such actions can lead to perfectly reasonable and mainstream conservative voices being silenced.

Meanwhile, progressive, liberal, and conservative voices like Glenn Greenwald, Alan Dershowitz, and Mollie Hemingway have all been smeared and libelled for being 100% correct about the Russiagate debacle.

There is a serious movement our there to shut you up, and it’s being done “for your own good.” Mainstream media doesn’t believe you can think for yourself, and they’re hellbent on not letting you by obscuring facts with biases.

If this movement is successful, then perhaps CNN won’t look so foolish in the future—not because they aren’t lying to you, but because you will have no way of knowing.

As was the case on April 18, 1930, there is no news today. But this time, the implications are much, much darker.

with files by Roberto Wakerell-Cruz