How did they get such a major story so wrong?
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” went a popular 1970 aphorism. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a stupider definition of love. Doesn’t love entail always being prepared to say you are sorry?
But, according to Glenn Greenwald, it does appear that a similar rule now applies to mainstream journalists. Greenwald is one of a small cadre of prominent left-wing journalists — Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi are others — for whom the pursuit of truth continues to be a desideratum. Last November, he left the Intercept, an online publication he founded, when a column on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer was censored by the editors. And he was an ongoing critic of the Trump–Russian collusion story served up by the mainstream media for nearly two years, until the Mueller investigation turned up nothing.
His subject this week was the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick in the wake of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot. On January 8, the New York Times published a “gut-wrenching” story of how Sicknick was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by the mob.
The only problem with the story was that it was not true, and that should have been evident to any journalist who made even the most perfunctory effort to ascertain the facts.
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