Tag Archives: jane mayer

Scott Walter On Jane Mayer’s Fraudulent Journalism

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Scott Walter at Capital Research.org:

In her last book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Mayer bewails the “100 biggest known donors in 2014,” who spent “nearly as much money on behalf of their candidates as the 4.75 million people who contributed $200 or less.” Who were those terrible donors? Mayer says, “A few of the biggest spenders were now Democrats.”

Check her source in the endnotes, and you find how many “a few” equals:

Donors who gave exclusively or primarily to Democratic candidates and groups held down 52 of the top 100 spots—including by far the biggest donor of disclosed 2014 cash: retired San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.

I chose Mayer’s “a few” as the worst lie in the book, but I had to write a long review to catalog all her other distortions and falsehoods. One book chapter had previously appeared as a New Yorker hit piece, and my earlier dissection of that partisan journalism drew this response from John Hinderaker of Powerline:

Walter’s article was perhaps the most devastating refutation of a magazine article I have ever read. In a calm, dispassionate manner, he laid waste to Mayer to a degree that in a more just world would end her career in journalism.

Hinderaker asked readers to leave comments at Mayer’s blog, begging her to respond, but of course she refused. Silence is golden when you’re a wealthy New Yorker from a famous banking family, writing for prestige media whose business model is to give an overpaid, underinformed audience only what it wants to hear.

New Cambridge Study Of Disinformation Is Full Of Disinformation

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The latest effort of the academic-media complex to steer citizens in the direction that the powers-that-be prefer comes in the shape of “The Disinformation Age,” edited by Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Despite the prestigious publisher, a cursory glance is enough to tell me that this is the usual reverse-engineered history, by which I mean that the authors already know what their conclusions are going to be and are determined to rewrite history to fit them.

Just one small example. The book dwells on the influence of the Koch brothers on the establishment libertarian think-tanks like the Mercator Center and the Cato Institute, NEVER mentioning that that “beltway libertarianism” is only one form of right libertarianism, and not the most radical or convincing by any means. That brand of libertarianism is in fact constantly criticized by anarchist libertarians as well as by minarchists.

What’s more, the Cambridge book has the nerve to source the term “Kochtopus,” coined by the libertarians at Mises.org/Lew Rockwell, to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, whose use of it came several years later and whose knowledge of the whole history of the Kochtopus is at second-hand, filtered through liberal-left tropes, and filled with suspicious gaps and elisions.

LRC: 2008 March 25 How Libertarian Is the Kochtopus

MindBodyPolitic.com:  2009, April 3,  The Libertarian Kochtopus

New Yorker: 2010:  The Koch Brothers’ Covert Ops

Mayer, a documentedly uninformed and lazy investigator got the whole Kochtopus network notion from bloggers who picked it up from the Ron Paul libertarians, which included me at the time, whom Matt Taibbi, a fellow left-lib journalist, was following, plagiarizing, and misrepresenting.

According to  this Cambridge disinfo guide, “Kochtopus” is the term Jane Mayer “likes to call the network”…. no mention of the piddling fact that dozens if not hundreds of people had analyzed the network and called it that long before she did, all of them with a world-view diametrically opposite hers.

The charge of plagiarism surfaced fairly soon, but the New Yorker did its own misleading pseudo- investigation and came to the unsurprising conclusion that there was no there there.

Not surprising, since Mayer is a prime product of the nepotistic and incestuous media culture.

InfluenceWatch tells us the following:

Mayer’s maternal grandfather was Allan Nevins, founder of American Heritage magazine and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Mayer’s great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, who founded the investment bank Lehman Brothers. [15]

That’s who decides what’s disinformation and what isn’t. Plagiarists and propagandists live in a bubble all their lives, sheltered from any necessity to defend their ideas honestly, and the result is false, empty history.

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