It’s difficult to be patient.  It’s hard to wait and let stories develop.  It’s hard work to investigate and vet sources.  But just occasionally it’s both gratifying and amusing to be a part of things like this, albeit small on my part.

Watching the developments over the last couple of days brought a smile to my face and made me glad to be alive and able to appreciate what I’ve seen.  The MSM has absolutely self destructed, little progressive heads have exploded all over the place, and it’s wonderful to sit back and observe the festivities over something so allegedly fake and fabricated as #Pizzagate.

But first things first.  This began months ago when a journalist named Ben Swann began studying #Pizzagate, I’m sure using the sources found by the citizen investigators.  He did a fairly short presentation for CBS46 in Atlanta on Pizzagate.  By my estimation it was fairly benign and moderate, but he was certainly honest and careful.  It was a good piece of investigative journalism making use of the discoveries by the citizen investigators.  Here it is.

Queue the fireworks and exploding progressive heads.  It was the first MSM piece that didn’t claim to “debunk” Pizzagate, but rather, gave it an honest hearing.  That cannot be allowed among the rank and file.  The attacks started and will continue for some time I’m sure.

First, YouTube began suppressing search results for Ben.  Within not too many hours of the presentation, too short a time to craft anything meaningful in reply, the attacks started.  Huffington Post, Media Matters, The Daily Beast, Gizmodo and The Washington Post all jumped on Ben Swann with hit pieces like he was ending journalism as they knew it.

Further, Ben Swann articles were scrubbed from reddit, and the most interesting thing of all is that we’ve learned that CBS46 took down their post of the video.  Here is a phone call where they admit it.

A “URL problem.”  This is priceless.  Above I said that the hit pieces were crafted like Ben Swann had ended journalism as they all know it.  Of course, that isn’t what happened.  That occurred long before now at the hands of the MSM.  No one cares about them anymore, so their own “get thee to thy fainting couch” reactions over their lost credibility are wasted effort.

But ironically, if it’s ever to be rebuilt, it will have to be with people like Ben Swann.  Let me interpret for you what’s happened.  There are those true believers in the “big state,” those “journalists” who believe that the government can do no wrong, who believe that the progressives have the correct vision for the world and that a monopoly of force should and must be used to enforce that vision.  They will never believe that anything nefarious could occur.  The state is righteous by definition.

This is a point of interest for my oldest son, Joshua, who quips from time to time about how the old conservatives and liberals have swapped places.  Not the neo-cons, many of whom are in bed with the progressives, but the conservatives like me – those who believe that government must have checks and balances and that the best government is the smallest and least intrusive government.

I’m not so sure that we’ve actually swapped places like he thinks, as the hippie movement always had statism at its core, it was just that they weren’t in power and others were.  Besides, neocons aren’t really conservatives anyway.  What we’re watching now is the logical consequence and necessary outcome of the Bohemian flower child generation.  These are the children of the hippies, both literally and ideologically.

But there is a second category of “journalists” who lament Ben Swann’s presentation, and they’re are the most interesting to me.  Years ago when my son Daniel was in the Marines and I was a military blogger, I wrote a story on their operations entirely from email communications with Lt. Col. William Mullen (now Brigadier General).  I couldn’t do it any other way.  I tried to go to Iraq and report on his battalion, but I started too late and the funds weren’t there.  I added some of what I knew without my conversations with Mullen, and it turned into a decent article.  Not great, perhaps not even really good, but decent.  Decent enough to publish, and that’s about it.

A friend named Bill Ardolino, who was a legitimate combat reporter, wrote me with both congratulations and lamentations.  He liked the piece and congratulated me for getting the story.  He lamented the fact that he considered it “his story” that I scooped.  Half jokingly, but still, I could tell that he had wanted to write what I had written.

Bill went on to write a much better report from Fallujah in 2007 than I did, so I didn’t really scoop him.  But here’s the thing.  Ben Swann really did scoop the rest of the MSM put together.  They are rattling their cages, chomping at the bits, barking at the walkers, or however you want to put it, waiting for the government – there’s that notion again of government omniscience – to tell them it’s okay to write about it because charges are coming down, or investigations are underway, or court dates have been set.

The editors are holding them back.  Investigative journalism is over in America.  All of the moral preening in the “journalism” community, all of the pining away for how things used to be, all of the time spent in journalism classrooms, is all just so much flotsam and jetsam.  It’s just all irrelevant, and no one outside of their little circle of self righteous watchers cares.  The watchers have turned into talking heads and pundits who interpret official talking points for the masses, nothing more.

Citizen investigators are beating everyone to the punch, and we finally see a courageous journalist who dares to go out and speak truth to power, and lo and behold, it’s not his detractors who did the piece.  Outrage!  Ben got their scoop, and they’re pissed about it.  He was first out of the gate, and so he must be censored, even by his own station.

The MSM sucks, and it doesn’t just suck, but it sucks really, really badly.  It’s worse than totally worthless.  It has a deleterious affect on the culture.  I work around many people every day, and I’m sure readers do as well, whose initial reaction to anything the MSM writes is either to ignore it or believe exactly the opposite simply because the MSM said it – not just conservatives, but everyone.  If fake news is a problem, it begins and ends with the MSM.  I’m not sure it’s possible for the collective community to recover, but if it stands any chance, doing what they did to Ben Swann is diametrically opposed to what they should be doing.  Their instincts are so bad I’m disinclined to believe that they can ever recover.

Prior:

Pizzagate XV

Planeload of FBI Agents Sent To Iceland To Frame Julian Assange

Pizzagate XIII: Who Really Leaked The DNC And Podesta EMails To Wikileaks?

Pizzagate XII

Pizzagate XI

Pizzagate X

Pizzagate IX

Pizzagate VIII

Pizzagate VII

Pizzagate VI

Pizzagate V: Pizzagate In Theological Perspective

Pizzagate IV

Pizzagate III

Pizzagate II

Pizzagate