The New York Times Ignoring The Swalwell Scandal Explains The Problem

When we talk about America increasingly becoming two nations, it’s not about race or income, it’s about competing information silos that have been driven by the media choosing to be the silo for one worldview and political side instead of fair, neutral information sources that can fuel the debates between worldviews. Race and income are simply topics within the separate silos.

The New York Times is the primary example of this as the nation’s most influential mainstream media organ. Most newspapers in some fashion follow the lead of the Times, giving it outsized influence beyond its gigantic digital presence. The Time’s coverage, or lack thereof, of the U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell scandal is an example of the daily fueling of the competing information silos that it participates in, even leads in.

Swalwell had a long relationship, probably intimate, with a Chinese spy called Fang Fang. These are not right-wing accusations. These are known facts from the FBI investigation of the spy. The FBI informed Swalwell about her and the California Congressman said he ended it immediately. But Swalwell led the charge against Trump on Russian collusion — from the House Intelligence Committee. That committee requires high clearance and gets high-level, classified documents.

This is a pretty big scandal, and once upon a time it would have been a juicy one. Swalwell ran for President and has been all over mainstream media news channels. This all has broken over the past month or so. But as is seen with the screenshot of a search for the number of New York Times stories on it in the past month, the media is ignoring it.

The newspaper that fancies itself as reporting “all the news that’s fit to print” found no news worth printing of a Chinese Communist spy sleeping with a high-level Congressman on the House Intelligence Committee.

This is prima facia a major scandal from a high-profile member of Congress with a big juicy twist of hypocrisy, and the Times finds no news fit to print. In a very measurable way, there is actually more truth to the Swalwell scandal than to the literally thousands of stories the old gray lady did on Trump Russia collusion. The latter covered breathlessly never happened. The former is ongoing and remains ignored. This is, after all, what you would expect from Democrat communications operatives.

Most conservatives know about Swalwell’s Chinese spy scandal, because conservative media has been covering it. Readers of the Times? Nope. And so we have the two information silos driving Americans further apart based on information. If we live in a time of information warfare, this is certainly part of it.

The competing silos continue to feed the impossibility of having discussions or debates between right and left because both are operating from different sets of information. There is no common language of information to form discussions. It’s just a rat-a-tat-tat of righties firing off from our information silo and lefties firing off from theirs, and both assuming the other side is completely ignorant.

The fault for this mess falls squarely on the mainstream media, which, having abdicated all responsible coverage of events, simply cannot be trusted. They occasionally do some good stories, but they do a lot of Trump-Russia and non-Swalwell type reporting

So on any given day, you simply cannot trust them to be giving you the information you need. You can trust them to give you the Democratic talking points. Both sides can trust in that part. So if you’re a solid Democrat, they feed what you want to hear. If you’re a solid Republican, you recognize them as Democrat communication operatives.

And so more and more, the two Americas cannot even talk to each other.

©Rod Thompson. Follow Rod on Parler. Like on Instagram.

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