Reporters Should Stop Helping Donald Trump Spread Lies About Joe Biden and Ukraine

[Celerity]

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/22/reporters-stop-helping-donald-trump-spread-lies-joe-biden-ukraine/

By Robert Mackey

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP appears increasingly desperate to deflect questions about the flagrant abuse of power he seems to have committed this summer by withholding aid to Ukraine as he pressed that country’s new president to open an investigation into the false claim that Joe Biden abused his power as vice president to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine in 2015.

Since the news broke that Trump repeatedly pressed his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open an investigation into Biden, while delaying $250 million in military aid to Ukraine, the president has urged reporters again and again to look instead at the viral conspiracy theory that the former vice president had admitted on camera that he blackmailed Ukraine’s former president.

In fact, as a detailed review of the evidence conducted by The Intercept in May showed, Biden’s intervention in Ukrainian affairs that year, when he successfully pressed Ukraine’s then-president to dismiss a chief prosecutor who had failed to pursue corruption investigations, was no secret and was widely praised by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and international donors to the country.

The reason there is footage of Biden boasting about this intervention on stage at a public event in 2018 is that he knew he had nothing to hide. Put simply, there is no evidence to support the conspiracy theory that Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani want Ukraine to validate by opening an investigation. Still, it has become an article of faith among Trump supporters that Biden got the chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, dismissed to derail a corruption investigation of a Ukrainian firm his son was paid to advise.

But journalists at leading American news organizations — including CNN, the New York Times, Politico, ABC News, and MSNBC — have helped weaponize this disinformation by repeating the baseless smear over and over, without promptly and accurately conveying that Trump and Giuliani are lying about what the former vice president did in Ukraine. So lies and misinformation have been broadcast nationwide, reaching millions of people who will never read subsequent fact checks debunking them.

snip


Robert Mackey writes about national and international news through the prism of social media. Before joining The Intercept as a Senior Writer, he was a reporter and columnist for the New York Times, where he anchored the newspaper’s breaking news blog, The Lede, for five years, and wrote a news analysis column, Open Source, from 2014 to 2016. His work is focused on making sense of events through the close reading of firsthand accounts, photographs, and video posted on social networks by witnesses and participants.

His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Slate, and The Guardian.



the original article from May that destroys the anti-Biden rot :


A Republican Conspiracy Theory About a Biden-in-Ukraine Scandal Has Gone Mainstream. But It Is Not True.

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/10/rumors-joe-biden-scandal-ukraine-absolute-nonsense-reformer-says/

[Ilsa]

1. Bookmarking. K&R. nt

[oswaldactedalone]

2. Yes indeed

Your message needs to be spread far and wide.

[LincolnRossiter]

3. They can't help themselves. Somehow all these Ivy League-educated professional communicators never

figured out that constantly referencing a lie is spreading a lie.

I’m just kidding. They know better. It’s a part of their game. They want two things out of the 2020 election (in order of importance).

1. A close race to drive ratings and profits (nomination and GE)
2. Elizabeth Warren to win that close race

Joe Biden is a more than acceptable sacrifice.

[at140]

4. Yes, it is ALWAYS about ratings by the media

once we understand that, all the fog clears up.

[Celerity]

5. I guarantee WaPo (Bezos) and anything affiliated with NBC-Comcast do NOT want Warren over Biden

at the deep core. They will play their 'fairness' and rating bullshit games, that is for sure though.

[LincolnRossiter]

6. Ratings and profits are certainly paramount. Hell many would probably be sorry to see Trump's never-

ending three-ring circus go. They don’t even have to do real news. Just follow assclown around and he’ll keep the wheel turning.

But secondary to that, at least at the newsroom and editorial level, is a clear preference for Warren. Or at the very least someone other than Biden. Maybe Bezos or the CEOs of Disney and Comcast feel differently. But they don’t make editorial decisions.

They aren’t supposed to, at least.

[Celerity]

8. We must be reading and watching different shows and articles, or at least focusing

on different ones and different things. I do see hostility (until this Ukraine shit, so there I do give you a point) towards Biden on mostly superficial rot (calling out all his mistakes as 'OMG' gaffes, etc), but when it comes to Warren, I see a lot of open hostility towards her POLICIES (especially MFA), something that you very rarely see in regards to Biden's own policies.

If Warren was smart, she will drop the radical (radical for the US only, it is utter bog standard milquetoast for most other advanced nations) Sanders version of MFA and do it soon. MFA is not an electoral winner atm, will not be for a long time.

[LincolnRossiter]

9. Yes let's agree we must be watching different programs. For every mention of the political perils of

MFA, I get reminded of how she’s surged 3 points since August and how enthusiastic her support is (with Biden’s being “soft”) about half a dozen.

And FWIW, I don’t get why people who like her take that personally. I like her (though she’s pretty far to the left of me). I’m not blaming her for the media’s inability to just cover a race competently. Obama was my guy in 2008 and I have no problem admitting he was the media darling. Hillary was my gal in 16 and I think she got a better shake than Bernie up until she had all but secured the nomination.

[Celerity]

10. I like Warren too, I just think Biden is the best chance to boot Trump. If Pete

doesn't make it, I am all in for Biden.

[customerserviceguy]

7. Trump has always been clever

to get the MSM to do his dirty work. That's how he got to where he is.

[Gothmog]

11. Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden "did not violate anything"

Link to tweet

A former top Ukrainian prosecutor, whose allegations were at the heart of the dirt-digging effort by Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday he believed that Hunter Biden did not run afoul of any laws in Ukraine.

“From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko told The Washington Post in his first interview since the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint alleging pressure by President Trump on Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelensky.

Lutsenko’s comments about Hunter Biden — which echo what he told Bloomberg News in May — were significant, because Trump and his personal attorney Giuliani have sought to stir up suspicions about both Hunter and former vice president Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in recent weeks. Joe Biden is leading Trump in many opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election.

Hunter Biden has denied any wrongdoing, and there is no evidence he was involved in any lawbreaking in his work in Ukraine with the country’s largest private gas company.