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The Federalist: The Russia Probe Has Turned The News Into ‘Ancient Aliens’
The news media's rush to judgement on the Russia probe has left them looking like ancient astronaut theorists: entertaining but wrong.
David Marcus
One of my greatest guilty pleasures is my near-addiction to the History Channel show “Ancient Aliens.” It is an absurd, but astonishingly entertaining series that purports to reveal the truth behind extraterrestrial beings in the ancient world.
Hosted by Giorgio Tsoukalos and peppered with weird personalities, from legitimate professors to quack conspiracy kooks, the show is informative and charming, even if its grand conclusions are laughable. Increasingly, our mainstream news media is looking more and more like “Ancient Aliens,” and using similar storytelling techniques, to push narratives that fall apart under any serious scrutiny.
Segments on “Ancient Aliens,” now in its 12th season, have a familiar and predictable format. First, actual experts talk about real mythology, and give examples of curious carvings or hieroglyphs that kind of look like spaceships. They delve into the difficulties of certain ancient structures being built without modern tools, or point to the universality of some symbol across civilizations that had no contact with each other.
All of this is curious and leads to some head-scratching. But by the end of the segment, the nut job conspiracists of the show attempt their fraught explanations, usually ending with something like this: “Could the pyramids have been a global power source for alien spacecraft thousands of years ago? Ancient astronaut experts say, ‘Yes!’”
These days, the news, especially when covering the Trump administration, has been following this format in troubling ways. The coverage of the Russia investigation is a prime example. There are plenty of juicy and accurate facts to fill the opening of a segment of foreign interference in the election. Donald Trump Jr. did meet with a Russian offering opposition research against Hillary Clinton, Michael Flynn did lie about Russian contacts, WikiLeaks did try to damage Clinton by attacking the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems.
But, just as in “Ancient Aliens,” so far these interesting facts don’t tell the story the news media wants to tell. So too often we wind up with anchors or experts saying something like this: “Could the Trump campaign have colluded with Russians to interfere with the election? News media experts say, ‘Yes!’”
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/24...t-astronaut-theorists-entertaining-but-wrong/