(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) While the First Amendment may protect media outlets from government interference, it notably does not mean freedom from consequences.
Thus, the Associated Press must be held accountable for a false report published this week that recklessly brought Western forces to the brink of nuclear warfare with Russia.
And if sanctions were to be imposed, it couldn’t happen to a nicer group of Marxist subversives, whose antidemocratic views also happen to align with the party currently in power and many other powerful institutions that are looking to short-sell the American dream for their own enrichment.
Since the start of the Biden administration, leftist news outlets that tipped their hand to reveal their overt biases during the Trump years have alarmingly doubled down on their partisan brinksmanship by trying to silence opposing narratives.
That sometimes has bordered on being downright dangerous and antithetical to its role as a core gatekeeper of democracy, as when the AP, a syndicated news agency reprinted by hundreds of other news outlets, supported left-wing demagoguery that has accused election-integrity supporters of being “Jim Crow 2.0” and former President Donald Trump’s supporters of being “semi-fascist.”
Irrespective of Democrats’ leadership failures, the AP has carried water for their political agenda, however far outside the mainstream they may be. At times, it also has appeared to have been compromised by China.
American Pravda is the arbiter of truth. Their objective experts issue fact-checks of misinformation.
This is from the AP fact-check of Dr. Malone, suspended by BigTech (enforcer of truth) after AP published it.
What do you think of the evidence presented in this AP Fact Check? pic.twitter.com/Ha7IUcA7bP
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) January 2, 2022
Meanwhile, it has been a standard-bearer for false reporting, as seen in its coverage of the 2022 midterm election and the assault hoax involving Paul Pelosi.
But its aggressive approach to covering the war between Russia and Ukraine has proven more than anything its status as a propagandist mouthpiece for the warmongering establishment.
In February, at the outset of the current phase in the six-year-long conflict, the AP and others, supported by the Biden intelligence community, launched a full-scale blitz against ZeroHedge, one of the largest of all conservative media sites, accusing it of spreading Russian disinformation due to its skepticism of the Ukraine narrative.
“The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence,” wrote the AP. “The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia.”
However, the AP acknowledged that it was working in collaboration with the government to spread the anti-Russian narrative “as part of a concerted push to expose and influence the moves of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
ZeroHedge countered with a satirical piece accusing the AP of running counter-intelligence for Hillary Clinton.
But their humor piece may have proven to be more accuratie than the AP’s “serious” reporting.
On Tuesday of this week, the AP dropped another anonymously sourced bombshell: AP source: Russian missiles cross into Poland during strike.
According to the site CounterPunch, the story continued to “evolve” with stealth editing and revisions throughout the day.
Biden, who was attending the G20 Summit in either Indonesia or Colombia, gathered with other leaders of the smaller G7 council to discuss a response, but reports later confirmed that the missile had actually come from Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued throughout the day to push for anything but a measured response, while denying his own culpability in the strike that killed two.
Along with the flight path, photographs of the missile’s shrapnel confirmed it to be of Ukrainian origin, helping to avert a situation in which NATO’s mutual defense treaties may have been triggered.
Nonetheless, the Democrat administration milked the latest development by pushing for another $38 billion in Ukraine spending, on top of the nearly $100 billion already sunk into the Eastern European quagmire.
Even worse, it came as reports rolled in that the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency company FTX had helped to funnel U.S. tax dollars from Ukraine back into the pockets of Democrats’ political campaigns as part of an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
And on top of everything, photos showed that CIA Director William Burns just happened to be in Warsaw when the missile struck.
The many layers of intrigue and appalling corruption involved in this scandal desperately demand the scrutiny of a watchdog press.
But the AP offered little more than a paragraph-long correction on Wednesday for nearly effecting a nuclear apocalypse through its misreporting.
“In earlier versions of a story published November 15, 2022, The Associated Press reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people,” it wrote, according to Fox News. “Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.”
In a bygone era, the sweet Schadenfreude of its humiliating correction might be sufficient.
But after repeated cases of egregiously—and aggressively—false reporting this year alone, with the stakes growing exponentially higher to include not only the end of democracy but the end of the world itself, it seems clear that the Fifth Estate model supported by the framers of the U.S. Constitution has been corrupted to the point of harming civilization.
Just as defamation law carves out a First Amendment exception for harm against an individual, it is high time media malpractice liabilities be put in place for any outlet whose reporting results in clear and present danger to our continuing existence.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers.
