The Mueller Report thread

[Belsnickel]

This is what I expected to be quite honest. The only lingering question I have from Mueller's report is what was the wording from Mueller as to why he was not making a typical prosecutorial judgement on obstruction. Was it because he felt it fell outside of his scope to make that decision? Was it due to DoJ policy? Was it a lack of evidence to the standard to indict? Or lack of evidence to the standard to convict? Those questions are ones I feel will need to be worked through before people on the left will feel comfortable with the decisions made.

There has just been so much spin already with this that it's disgusting. I'm happy that the report said no collusion. I mean this, because as divided as our country is right now I think a finding otherwise would have done terrible things. I think the biggest problem right now is how much the media has been hyping all things Russia. I think our current media landscape needs to take a hard look at itself. Yeah, this Russiagate issue is owned by the liberal-leaning media, but we have a system of media with political leanings that are servants to the almighty dollar. It's a brutal combination and one that has led me to really reconsider my media consumption over the last few years. The media screwed the pooch in 2016 with Trump. They treated him like a joke and gave him so much attention. Even left-leaning outlets really served to help him win, focusing more on his (very few) policies than they did on Clinton's. In the wake of that loss, they over-corrected with Russiagate and are now being force fed crow they should have been eating in bits and pieces all along.

I am, and will remain, a proponent of investigative journalism. Of good journalism. It does still exist out there with some of the writers doing their thing. One of the journalists I like to read a lot is Matt Taibbi. Some of you may know him. He wrote the book I Can't Breathe about Eric Garner specifically, but community policing and excessive force more broadly. He has been writing a serial book called Hate Inc. which is a biut of an indictment on the current media landscape. This is a snippet from the introduction:

Quote:People should trust reporters. It’s the context in which they’re operating that’s problematic. Now more than ever, most journalists work for giant nihilistic corporations whose editorial decisions are skewed by a toxic mix of political and financial considerations. Unless you understand how those pressures work, it’s very difficult for a casual news consumer to gain an accurate picture of the world.

I just started reading this from Taibbi over the weekend, but this sentiment is one of the reasons you have seen me state that I follow journalists online, not their outlets. Anyway, the reason for me bringing this all up is because Taibbi made a post on Saturday that was a little earlier than he was planning, but the timing of everything was too good. In this post, he discusses the media's failings with their reporting on Russiagate. I encourage you to check it out, and the rest of the public posts he has out there, if you have the time.


It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD