Quote (bogie160 @ Apr 20 2021 01:00pm)
Brian Sicknick died of natural causes. It is not a mystery. There is no evidence that bear spray or any other chemical agent had a role in his death. There was certainly no fire extinguisher. The media narrative was completely and utterly incorrect. The only intentional death that day was an unarmed Trump supporter who was shot to death by Capitol police.
I was asking a few days after the riot, "How did Sicknick die?", and no one had an answer. His family's statements directly contradicted the "unnamed" source within the Police Department who suggested to the NYT and others that it might have been a fire extinguisher. \
In a normal world, the New York Times would explain how they got this so fantastically wrong, what organizational failures were at play, and what measures (i.e. terminations, discipline, and added oversight) they've taken to correct for their string of astoundingly awful mistakes. But of course they won't, because as Greenwald notes, their readers are invested in this being the truth, and would prefer to gaslight it away and pretend Greenwald is some conspiracy theorist instead of an over-sensitive yet largely correct journalist on these specific issues.
You either believe that the NYT is an unprofessional and incompetent outlet, or that they relaxed standards and avoided questions that would conflict with the narrative.
Greenwald staked out the position because he's sympathetic to Trump supporters and hates people opposed to Trump, and he ended up being right about the possibility that the cause of death wasn't related to the insurrection, even though when a cop randomly dies after an incident like that, most reasonable people assume it had something to do with the incident. Anyone who watched footage inside and around the Capitol knows that this was a violent crowd. The shooting of that woman was completely justified. Of course, the twitter thread was more than just the narrow question on how Sicknick died. As far as Greenwald being largely correct on these issues, I disagree. He's been hyper skeptical of plenty of stories that turn out to be credible, typically when it's regarding Trump or Russia. The guy waited three years to start believing that Russia actually did hack the DNC. I posted a twitter thread in the collusion thread covering that.
There's a basic level of trust that exists between media figures and public officials... I don't know that it's a bad thing. It occurs at all levels of the news business. Sometimes the public officials turn out to be wrong, even though they were in a position to know the truth, and no blatant motivation to lie about it. The amount of valid information released by anonymous sources far outweighs the incorrect information... it's not even close.
This post was edited by IceMage on Apr 20 2021 12:28pm