A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency, and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for profit or influence ( Learn More ). Sources listed in the Questionable Category may be very untrustworthy and should be fact-checked on a per-article basis. Please note sources on this list are not considered fake news unless specifically written in the reasoning section for that source. See all Questionable sources.
Overall, we rate TrendingPoliticsNews.com Right Biased and Questionable based on poor sourcing, promotion of propaganda, conspiracy theories, and several failed fact checks by their parent source TrendingPolitics.com.
Moreover the network didn’t just re-report this stuff, it became the favored launching pad for all the most blatant blue-Anon disinformation, like California congressman Adam Schiff saying he had “ more than circumstantial ” evidence of collusion, or former Obama defense official Evelyn Farkas suggesting the Trump administration would try to destroy evidence if they “ found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians .” Farkas later testified under oath that she “ didn’t know anything ” about collusion.
You’ll read about this (and see it, in an extraordinary video mashup our own Matt Orfalea prepared for a larger story series coming out in the next weeks), but we found MSNBC mentioned Hamilton 68, the infamous “dashboard” of accounts supposedly linked to “Russian influence activities” outed as a fraud in the Twitter Files, over 100 times in a period between the summer of 2017 and November of 2019.
One of those instances came in a typical MSNBC broadcast from that time, on January 19, 2018. It featured a quartet of security-state goblins — former Bush official Nicolle Wallace, Langley-sniffing Ken Dilanian, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, and ex-CIA official Evan McMullin — gang-botching a story about the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag:
Note how many things they get wrong in this segment. Vance says there’s nothing to accusations of FISA abuse later proven by Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz (“A lot of hullabaloo about nothing at the end of the day”). The CIA’s McMullin touts the Steele Dossier (“Much of it has been validated”). Dilanian rushes at the end to squeeze in the Hamilton hoax (“This release…is the top hashtag among Russian bots and trolls, according to Hamilton 68”).
It’s extremely rare that a journalist who’s actually trying to avoid mistakes makes even one factual mistake as big as falling for the Hamilton hoax or the Steele Dossier, or dismissing the Nunes memo. These people managed all three at once. If I’d made even one error of that magnitude early in my career, I wouldn’t have had a career. This kind of thing was basically constant for years, when MSNBC was the staging ground for many lunatic conspiracy theories involving Trump, Russia, and their delicacy item, the Dossier.
As I was leaving the set of my last appearance on All In six years ago, Rachel was getting ready to go on and re-frame how the network did news. My shrugging take was that if journalists didn’t have confirmation, they couldn’t report. Rachel argued the opposite, that official silence meant you could assume things:
I mean, had the FBI looked into what was in that dossier and found that it was all patently false, they could tell us that now, right? I mean, the dossier has now been publicly released. If the FBI looked into it and they found it was all trash, there’s no reason they can’t tell us that now. They’re not telling us that now. They’re not saying that. They’re not saying anything.
As we later found out, among other things via Jeff Gerth’s gigantic piece in the Columbia Journalism Review , the FBI said nothing about many stories it knew to be wrong, including the influential New York Times exposé, “ Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence .” The possibility that officials can lie to us in this way — leaking, asking that attribution be limited to uncheckable “sources familiar with the matter,” then saying nothing as stories start taking water — is exactly why we don’t stick our necks out for such people.
The fact that MSNBC would even promote itself as a news organization is laughable. The fact that they accuse anyone else of exactly what they do is the height of hypocrisy. They are an all out left wing opinion propaganda station. They should own it.
Taibbi's response to someone saying his twitter file reporting is inaccurate is to bring up some other media entities stories from 5 or 6 years ago. Taibbi was brought on the show to account for HIS journalism, not somebody else's.
In the span of about 1 minute he is forced to admit three times that he had something wrong. And thats not even counting his ignoring Trumps attempts to get twitter to censor stories he didnt like.
As Hassan points out, there was a time when Matt Taibbi would be going after Elon Musk, not making excuses for him.
And Hassan lied about never talking about Hunter Biden and one of his " gotcha's" was actually true.
Mehdi you obviously haven't read the reporting here. CISA is the DHS agency that partnered with EIP. Here's an email of a CISA employee discussing an EIP-ticketed misinfo report to Twitter employees. Matt got it right.
Matt Taibbi used to be a "hero" to progressives. Something went wrong.
Medhi Hassan humiliates him in this interview as lazy, unprepared, inaccurate in his claims about twitter.
Funny how different interpretations of the same event can be.
Those are two ads from the website you link to.
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There are other examples but I am sure you would have issues with any source that don't support your narrative.
Taibbi was not prepared, was defensive throughout, and acted like is above questioning.
Hassan points out numerous factual mistakes Taibbi made in his reporting and tweeting about the Twitter Files.
Hmmmm. So what should I believe, what I saw or what one of the most biased people I have ever encountered says?
The irony of MSNBC attacking "bad reporting"
The fact that MSNBC would even promote itself as a news organization is laughable. The fact that they accuse anyone else of exactly what they do is the height of hypocrisy. They are an all out left wing opinion propaganda station. They should own it.
Taibbi's response to someone saying his twitter file reporting is inaccurate is to bring up some other media entities stories from 5 or 6 years ago. Taibbi was brought on the show to account for HIS journalism, not somebody else's.
In the span of about 1 minute he is forced to admit three times that he had something wrong. And thats not even counting his ignoring Trumps attempts to get twitter to censor stories he didnt like.
As Hassan points out, there was a time when Matt Taibbi would be going after Elon Musk, not making excuses for him.
That is what an independent journalist should do. Report the facts, not choose a side and spin the story to support that side.
And Hassan lied about never talking about Hunter Biden and one of his " gotcha's" was actually true.
The true facts about the former Twitter management has come out.
No amount of white wash will change that.
Who cares?