Watch the Hissy Fit When Students Nail Media for Disinformation at 'Disinformation' Conference

The Atlantic's Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg and David Axelrod. Credit: The Chicago Thinker

The Atlantic and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics held a “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference over the past three days. They intended to explore the “organized spread of disinformation” and the ways to deal with it.

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What was ironic was that they had speakers at their conference — mainly media types like CNN’s Brian Stelter — who are the very personification of disinformation. But a few college students managed to put them on the spot, and point out the inherent contradiction in their effort.

As we reported, college freshman Chris Phillips just eviscerated Brian Stelter with CNN’s pushing of disinformation.

Stelter didn’t have much of a response, other than to call it a “popular right-wing narrative” and try to deflect it.

But that wasn’t all. There were some other fascinating and revelatory looks into the mind of the liberal media.

There was the Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, whom freshman Daniel Schmidt asked about how the media had dealt with the issue of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the lies told to suppress it.

Applebaum’s response showed exactly why no one trusts the liberal media anymore.

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Now that they can’t call it “disinformation” anymore, because it’s so true that even liberal media admitted it, they have to come up with some other reason to ignore it. Applebaum called it “totally irrelevant” as to who should be president — and not interesting.

So influence-peddling — someone in the highest office in the land possibly being compromised by relationships with foreign governments — is not interesting? Possible Russian blackmail isn’t interesting? How does she call herself a journalist? And here’s another question: If this isn’t interesting and is “irrelevant,” then why did the media spend four years pushing the false, Russia collusion hoax that was paid for in part by the Democrats? Why was that relevant and interesting?

Interestingly, even though she says this now, she pushed the Russia disinformation claim when it came to the Hunter Biden laptop, so it was “interesting” enough to do that. Speaking of disinformation, Applebaum falsely wrote in 2020 that President Donald Trump called COVID a “hoax.” That wasn’t true, but it was a common media falsehood.

The media types at the Disinformation conference were so upset that Daniel Schmidt dared to question them that they hauled out this pathetic effort by Never Trumper and token ‘conservative’ Jonah Goldberg. And you can see the difference between the freshman asking cogent questions and Goldberg pushing an anti-Trump narrative, ignoring the facts and statistics that Schmidt brought up about 16 percent of people who voted for Biden saying they wouldn’t have, if they knew the information about Hunter Biden.

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But Schmidt never said that, but for the cover-up of the laptop, President Donald Trump would have won; he cited the poll with the responses of the voters — a fact Goldberg doesn’t want to deal with, so he skips right over that to try to refute something Schmidt never said. Now, yes, because of the cover-up we don’t know exactly what would have happened, but what we do know is that those voters would not have voted for Biden in a race that was very close in critical states. That’s a reality that Goldberg doesn’t want to deal with.

Finally, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was upset that students were showing up the ‘professional journalists’ — and he had a little bit of a hissy fit.

“I think one darkly humorous but inevitable measurement of our success is that our disinformation conference has been the subject of a disinformation campaign on social media already,” he said. Is “success” what they call being eviscerated now?

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So, students asking them honest questions is “disinformation” because they don’t like the questions? I think the students just proved their point.

I want to tip my hat to the students behind the questions from The Chicago Thinker. It’s good to see that some real journalists are coming up who care about the truth.

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