Media making its own reality

 National Review:

Not a single journalist at America’s paper of record asked anyone with first-hand knowledge whether the late Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer, was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher before they reported it. They took the word of “law enforcement officials.”

The initial Times report about Officer Sicknick’s death, from January 8, was paved over with caveats on February 12. In between that time, we got the big feature story that was premised on the original lie: “He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob.” That article, too, now has a note appended to the top: “New information has emerged.”

And what is that “new information”? The D.C. medical examiner now says that Sicknick showed no signs of internal or external injury, and that he died after suffering two strokes. People are free to speculate that the stress of the Capitol riot may have contributed to his strokes. That seems plausible. But why did this take months to figure out? Why did people keep repeating that Sicknick had been bludgeoned to death for so long, despite the fact that there was enough reporting in the first two days after the riots to cast doubts on the story?
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We’ve had this happen often lately. Allegations that Russian intelligence agents had offered the Taliban bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan were confirmed by half a dozen outlets, but by the time it became clear that they were untrue, the story itself had faded away. A few years ago, there was a supposed epidemic of sexual assault on campus, one that justified the weird Title IX letter and university kangaroo courts. But the story of Columbia University’s “mattress girl” and Rolling Stone’s giant exposé of an alleged rape at the University of Virginia both fell apart on further examination.

Many times, news stories are constructed just from a little accumulated hearsay. Instead of reporting that an event happened, newspapers report a subject’s claims that something happened, but do so in a way that makes the event itself seem like fact. Outrage and social-justice entrepreneurs have used this feature of the news business to produce hundreds of hoax political crimes. Those stories, too, explode and disappear in the flood of corrections eventually, but only after readers have internalized the atmosphere of crisis they created.
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The NY Times false report was repeated by others.  I suspect the reason this false story got into print, to begin with, and was repeated is that Democrats in Washington wanted it to be true.  They wanted an excuse for claiming an attempted insurrection so they could use it in another bogus impeachment effort and in fact, they included this false allegation in their efforts.  That the Times went with a story based on hearsay tells you something about how desperate they were to push that narrative.

It is a coincidence that so many of the false charges against President Trump from the time he won the election on turned out this way?  I suspect it happened because the media so desperately wanted the allegations to be true.