MEDIA MALFEASANCE: Several Outlets Push False Claims About Justice Thomas Dissent To Smear Him
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This is clearly an attempt to not just smear Justice Clarence Thomas, but also the pro-lifers he was writing about.
In a dissenting opinion on a religious-liberty challenge to New York’s COVID vaccine mandate from 16 health care workers that the Supreme Court declined to hear, Justice Thomas cited the very real objection that many pro-lifers have when it comes to taking the Fauci Ouchies — that the use of cell lines derived from aborted children were used in the development of the vaccines.
From that Axios made the stretch that Justice Thomas “suggests” that COVID vaccines are made with “aborted children.”
Clarence Thomas suggests COVID vaccines are made with “aborted children” https://t.co/hHHG33qtQb
— Axios (@axios) June 30, 2022
NBC News called it a “debunked claim” that the COVID jabs were made with aborted fetal cells.
Justice Thomas cites debunked claim that Covid vaccines are made with cells from ‘aborted children’ https://t.co/o4lB6oRioa via @nbcnews
— Adam Edelman (@abedelman) June 30, 2022
The granddaddy prize for disinformation goes to Politico with their clickbait tweet with its own “fact check.”
Cells obtained from elective abortions decades ago were used in testing during the Covid vaccine development process.
The practice is common in vaccine testing — including for the rubella and chickenpox vaccinations. https://t.co/13YartfO5Z
— POLITICO (@politico) June 30, 2022
If you read the article, however, it shows just how disingenuous this smear actually is.
Politico quotes Justice Thomas’s dissent directly, “They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
And they follow that quote with some sort of “fact check” that debunks a claim that Thomas never made.
“None of the Covid-19 vaccines in the United States contain the cells of aborted fetuses. Cells obtained from elective abortions decades ago were used in testing during the Covid vaccine development process, a practice that is common in vaccine testing — including for the rubella and chickenpox vaccinations,” states the article. (Emphasis added)
Even the top “fact checker” at the Washington Post retweeted the Politico smear:
It’s good the fact checkers are on top of this… oh https://t.co/EB5RSm9J4Q pic.twitter.com/Yf4nSdnlsP
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 1, 2022
I’m beginning to suspect there are holes in this huge fact checking apparatus our press claims is so viral to a healthy democracy. Can you guess what it is, @GlennKesslerWP?
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 1, 2022
Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner put the outlets on full blast as he fact-checked their fact-checks.
By Friday morning, neither NBC News nor Axios had corrected their error, and the authors’ and outlets’ false or misleading tweets remained on display. The whole incident is a perfect example of how much of the liberal media live in a liberal echo chamber and are willing to abandon standards and believe anything that makes pro-lifers look bad…
…Thomas never said any vaccines contained the cells of aborted fetuses. He never cited anyone making that claim. But Axios, Politico, and NBC went out of their way to imply he did.
What Thomas said was some pro-lifers “object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
This is a 100% factually true statement. It is true both that some pro-lifers object on those grounds and that the vaccines were “developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.” Science magazine, to use just one example, has written that the vaccines were “manufactured using cells derived from human fetuses electively aborted decades ago” — almost the same exact wording as Thomas…
…Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of aborted children are in the vaccines, but NBC News, Politico, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an easily checkable fact.
Source: Washington Examiner
Carney also notes that both Pfizer and Moderna used the cell lines derived from an aborted Dutch baby for testing and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine used cell lines derived from a different aborted baby in the development of their vaccine, but not in testing. “The cells derived from the baby aren’t in the vaccine, but the cells act as something of a catalyst for a crucial ingredient (the adenovirus) in the J&J vaccine,” writes Carney.
He says that this pervasive “mistake” happened because the journos in their Lib bubbles don’t understand the pro-life position on the vaccines and that it appears that a bunch of reporters from major outlets are uncritically parroting a Slate journo…
In his dissent, Thomas claims that COVID vaccines were developed with the use of “aborted children.” https://t.co/43cSrepGNn
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 30, 2022
…whose tweet went viral on Lib Twitter.
"None of the Covid-19 vaccines..contain the cells of aborted fetuses. Cells obtained from elective abortions decades ago were used in testing during the Covid vaccine development process, a practice..common in vaccine testing -including for the rubella & chickenpox vaccinations." https://t.co/4duBWwE570
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 30, 2022
Justice QAnon? https://t.co/S0qsrsIjmy
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) June 30, 2022
But I'm supposed to believe that Alito and Thomas and Barrett overturned Roe for constitutional reasons https://t.co/nf5GMuImNv
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) June 30, 2022
Including ex-NBA player turned drug addict turned convicted criminal turned ex-CNN+ employee who has a massive Twitter following because he steals videos and reposts them without attribution.
There is a QAnon believer on the Supreme Court.
This should be a very very big story. https://t.co/EGtpGf8OAh
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) June 30, 2022
Chapman then went on posting racist tweets about Thomas… because, why not? He’s a Lib and gets a pass for these sorts of things.
But he’s not alone. Recently Hillary was making headlines for her attempt to smear the often jovial Clarence Thomas with the racist trope of being an “angry” black man.
The attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas have been unrelenting in the past few weeks — critics have called for his impeachment over his wife Ginny’s political activities and her texts to Mark Meadows on January 6 and over his concurring decision on Dobbs that stated that other Supreme Court precedents must actually be rooted in the law rather than shifting moral standards.
Gee, maybe this is why they were so against his appointment in 1992.
Many members of the left-leaning Regime Media are constantly bellyaching that the public’s trust in media is dropping like a stone and that there are “silos” where Americans seek out alternative media sources that are more in line with their worldview… yet they fail to acknowledge that the problem of no mainstream outlet reporting “just the facts” or even making a good faith attempt at balance.
The news is slanted with opinion inserted in it, but it’s apparently only a problem when those on the right side of the political spectrum do it.
Libs can get away with suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story and smearing the 45th President as a Russian stooge and that’s fine. They’ll get Pulitzers for it. Meanwhile, you say the wrong thing about the virus that originated in Wuhan — like asking if maybe the lab there that was conducting gain of function research into bat coronaviruses had something to do with a sudden outbreak of a brand new coronavirus — and you’ll get fact-checked and deplatformed.
So, don’t expect that these partisan propaganda peddlers will apologize for completely misrepresenting what Justice Thomas wrote.
The problem with the media’s new standard of misconstrual- if it can be read in bad faith I should report it that way for outrage clicks-is that it results in this competitive illiteracy. https://t.co/qPg91xWx8L
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) June 30, 2022
The closest Glenn will come is “Here is some added context. Decide for yourselves.”
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 1, 2022
The outright disinformation is a feature, not a bug in their reporting.
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