Rachel Maddow is caught on the middle of a career changing crisis.
The MSNBC host never imagined things would spiral so quickly out of control.
And now Rachel Maddow’s career hit rock bottom when she was faced with this ugly reality.
No broadcaster – not even anyone on fake news CNN – suffered as big a hit to their credibility in the wake of the Mueller report findings of no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian more than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Maddow rode the wave of Russian collusion conspiracy theories to massive ratings for two years.
However, when the truth came out hundreds of thousands of viewers fled Maddow’s program after they realized Maddow played them for suckers by lying to them.
Maddow is desperate to turn the tide – and justify her reported $10 million dollar a year salary – by digging in and doubling down on the Russian boogeyman.
Her latest attempt to keep this story alive was tweeting out an article by the Washington Post which claims a former YouTube engineer found that YouTube’s recommended video algorithm ranked videos from RT explaining the Mueller report findings – the Russian state owned media agency – higher than supposedly “mainstream” American media sources.
Former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot created the AlgoTransparency tool and according to the Washington Post it found that “some Mueller-related videos got recommended more often overall. “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” was recommended more than 5 million times. Some other channels, such as Fox and PBS NewsHour, got hundreds of thousands of recommendations for their Mueller videos. But no other video tracked by AlgoTransparency received recommendations from as many different channels as the RT one did.”
Chaslot also claimed that the most recommended video from RT called accurately so-called American “journalists” who fell for the Russian collusion hoax conspiracy theorists. To Maddow, this was more evidence of nefarious Russians manipulating social media to spread misinformation and social discord like the Moscow based troll farms did in the 2016 election.
YouTube spokesman Farshad Shadloo strongly denied these claims and questioned the validity of Chaslot’s findings.
“The AlgoTransparency tool was created outside of YouTube and does not accurately reflect how YouTube’s recommendations work, or how users watch and interact with YouTube,” Shadloo said. “We’ve designed our systems to help ensure that content from more authoritative sources is surfaced prominently in search results and ‘watch next’ recommendations in certain contexts, including when a viewer is watching news-related content on YouTube.”
YouTube’s response did not matter.
To Maddow, this was more evidence of nefarious Russians manipulating social media to spread misinformation and social discord like the Moscow based troll farms did in the 2016 election.
This was her chance to get back in the game on the Russia story and claim a measure of vindication.
But Aaron Mate – a liberal journalist who writes for the left-wing Nation magazine and who has long been skeptical of the so-called “mainstream” media’s Russian collusion hysteria – turned the tables on Maddow.
Mate tweeted out 19 different video examples of Maddow telling provable falsehoods and that her show is the type of content that YouTube should suppress if it heeded the calls of Maddow and other liberal journalists up in arms about Russian social media “misinformation.”
You can watch some of them below.
2/ Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience. You claimed Barr was handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron — on screen right below — told viewers the truth, that Mueller was in fact "assisting" w/ the redactions: pic.twitter.com/rTSAABngp2
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019
4/ BTW, just last week you falsely said that "the one thing I refused to let myself think about" was that Putin had tapes of Trump — the very prospect you had previously floated to posit that Putin may blackmail Trump into withdrawing troops. pic.twitter.com/xMC4uPrjSK
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019
6/ There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin "gives orders" to his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting. Do you think Putin ordered Trump to stage a coup in Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF treaty? pic.twitter.com/cbSrGt2xR3
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019
8/ How about when you suggested that Putin has gotten Trump to "bleed out" the FBI? If Mueller and the FBI found proof of that, I missed that part of their report. pic.twitter.com/hFT0ByWzlQ
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019
10/ How about when you claimed that the White House edited out a key question from the Trump-Putin presser? The WP showed that to be false, and the result of live video/audio switching issue (https://t.co/miq3aLxhGf). Yet you never corrected it: pic.twitter.com/LrnPyMcTMQ
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019
Of course, the great irony of this story is the RT video that YouTube recommended told the truth about the American media and their failings on the Russian collusion story.
The so-called “reporters” who fell for this hoax were conspiracy theorists and it was Maddow – and her fellow liberal reporters in America – that were the ones peddling lies and falsehoods.
We will keep you up to date on any new developments in this ongoing story.