For all the effort the establishment press puts into combating foreign and right-wing misinformation, it would do well also to look in a mirror.
The misinformation is coming from inside the house!
Martha Raddatz, ABC’s chief global affairs correspondent, inexplicably floated a conspiracy theory this week suggesting the Trump White House is removing senior defense officials because it is planning either “a military operation” or the “use of federal troops” for a yet-to-be-disclosed operation.
There is nothing to support any of this. Raddatz quite simply tossed the idea out there like a hand grenade to ABC’s thousands of viewers.
“Have you ever seen an interim period like this, a defense secretary out, three more top Pentagon officials tonight?” ABC’s David Muir asked the woman who moderated the 2012 vice-presidential debate. “And if this is unsettling for folks at home, what do your sources tell you tonight? Is there any concern that this could put national security at risk?”
“You know, no one has seen anything like this,” Raddatz responded, commenting on the removal this week of multiple high-level defense officials, including policy official James Anderson, intelligence official Joseph Kernan, former United States Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and his Chief of Staff Jen Stewart.
Raddatz added, “There is concern about what this means. Is the president planning a military operation? Or the use of federal troops, which Esper opposed.”
This is a real thing that a real journalist said on ABC’s network prime-time news program, which is watched by literally thousands of viewers.
Is the president secretly planning a military operation? Is he going to deploy federal troops around the country?
Great questions! If only there were a profession made up of people whose job it is to investigate such claims. If only there were people whose job it is to provide answers and not just give oxygen to unfounded, baseless conspiracy theories.
More seriously, what in the hell is Raddatz doing? She has been in the news business long enough to know better. Appearing on national network television to theorize that the White House is removing top defense officials because it is planning some big, shadowy military operation or the wide-scale deployment of federal troops is the sort of thing one would expect to hear from “resistance” activists or random YouTube personalities, not ABC News’s chief global affairs correspondent.
It is unacceptable that Raddatz would wink at this conspiracy theory, precisely because she knows better. It is doubly galling that her conduct, which has become the norm in the news industry over the past four years, coincides exactly with the press’s broader effort to punish right-of-center media for supposedly engaging in this sort of behavior.
Truly, we are living in an age of unprecedented lies and conspiracy theories. Thank God for our media, that bulwark of our democracy, for keeping us on the straight and narrow.
Anyway, coming up at 11, is Trump purging top officials so he can now do something terrifying with the military and federal troops? Tune in!
