Left Leaning Media: Get Off Your High Horse

Over the weekend, Dan Rather stood up for journalistic integrity, demanding that what Trump says must be called a “lie”. This, after the WSJ Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker said (paraphrasing), “Let’s distinguish between false facts and calling someone a liar; one is journalism and one implies knowledge of moral intent.” Push back from Rather supporters, “We know Trump’s bad moral intent because we’ve proven him false and Trump hasn’t listed to us.”

Rather’s own sordid history questions his avocation of integrity. He knows – just knows – that his reporting on Bush is truthful, while the memo he doubled down on that built the story has been proven to be falsified.

So, the left media is all about their establishing their identity as the authority to bridge between facts and moral truth. That’s offensive to me, but okay.. let’s go with as assumption that maybe it could be true.

Insert into this the left wing media’s prattling on with the narrative of Russia influencing the election. The facts are sparse. Nobody will really know. It’s like a court’s opinion. We can say what ~is~, but the deeper truth is that any legal truth is a court’s OPINION. I work in classified areas of cyber security. I totally “get” Trump’s claim that no computer is safe. That is not a slam against doing cyber security or cyber security professionals.

It IS a support for doing cyber security correctly. When I was interviewed by NASA to become an astronaut, the psychological test included questions like “If I stay in bed all day, I feel safer.” I answered “true” and was quizzed as to why I was so insecure. I pointed out that the statement is a factual truth for anybody. The psychologist said, “Oh, yea.. you’re one of those engineers.” In this spirit, accept what Trump said as true – if there is less cyber dependency, then there is less cyber risk. It’s an obvious fact. Why can’t the left media have an open enough mind to consider this?

But I digress. Back to Russia.. In the face of an intelligence community dependence on real humans (remember weapons in Iraq, for which the left media was all-in on pointing out intelligence community foibles), the left media states Russia hacking and intent is now true moral fact. Do you know how arrogant it is for anybody to claim ownership of those three words? “True Moral Fact”. The left media has overstepped their journalistic bounds.

But it’s worse. Rather’s memo is a known false artifact that created an unsupported story. He’s basically saying the false artifact doesn’t matter because he knows it took him to truth. Remember that logic. Now, hear the same left media demonstrating severe hypocrisy in context of the new Russian hacking story. They are now critiquing the artifacts of maybe Russian-leaked emails and ignoring the story content of those emails.

So here is the moral code of the left media:

1) It’s okay to use a (known) false artifact to report what they (somehow otherwise but can’t produce) know is truth as fact.

2) It’s okay to impugn ill-gotten artifacts so that they can ignore the truths the artifacts revealed – truths that often DID reveal moral intent in the emails.

This is why I support Joe Scarborough’s position in his recent inter-media tweets. It is not incumbent on him to justify or explain himself. It is incumbent on Sopan Deb to NOT claiming moral truth and superiority when the obvious implication of Deb’s original tweet is false. Deb owes an apology, not the other way around. It is Deb’s error and arrogant self-righteousness that initiated the conflict. It’s disgusting for Callum Borchers to write, “Notably absent from Scarborough’s tirade was an explanation of his objection to the word “partied.” He didn’t deny attending the party or say why he thought Deb’s characterization was unfair.” Scarborough doesn’t owe anybody a denial – anymore than Trump owes someone a denial of the KKK for the 20th time. We all know the intent of Deb’s initial twitter – Deb lied about partying with an intent to morally impugn Scarborough.

Deb, get off your high horse.