Clueless Hack Journo Evan Osnos Publishes Error-Ridden Hit Piece on Dan Bongino

(Pictured: An extremely accurate rendition of Evan Osnos)

Desperate to ride the coattails of a pundit people actually listen to, CNN correspondent Evan Osnos recently published a lengthy article on Dan Bongino. The piece may also serve to divert attention from CNN’s two pedophilia scandals, the recent scandals involving former host Chris Cuomo, or the sexual assault lawsuit against Don Lemon, though that’s just my speculation.

Osnos’ career is largely owed to him being the son of Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books. He’s published nothing of note throughout his career, and commonly hops on bandwagons – most notably doing wonders for his credibility by spreading easily debunked nonsense during the era of Trump-Russia hysteria as a “journalist” over at the New Yorker.

The pinned tweet of CNN's @eosnos, who wrote the color-by-numbers @NewYorker profile accusing Dan Bongino of spreading conspiracies to like-minded viewers. That's all these people do: babble about Russiagate and The Insurrection™ to like-minded liberals:pic.twitter.com/Vsljw9qusY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 29, 2021

His “exposé” was published in the New Yorker with the headline “Dan Bongino and the Big Business of Returning Trump to Power.” Like most long-form articles, roughly 25% of it actually attempts to make a point, while the remainder effectively amounts to Osnos telling us random irrelevant details he learned from google five minutes prior, and effectively talking to himself in a desperate attempt to meet his word quota.

The lengthy, rambling article  contains numerous falsehoods, inconsistencies, and lazy writing too.

For example, of election integrity, Osnos writes:

After Bongino’s monologue about the intelligence community, he moved on to another case for skepticism of American elections. In Arizona, he informed his audience, a “forensic audit,” launched by Trump supporters who were certain that his loss there was fraudulent, had delivered bad news: Biden received even more votes than originally counted.

He, like countless others, is burying the lede here, that the audit also found potential issues with a combined 53,305 ballots. Of course, Osnos missed that because he’s never read an article beyond a headline before.

Osnos enlisted Media Matters propagandist Angelo Carusone to outline just how very “scary” it is that the political right is building their own platforms, without mentioning any of his past scandals, such as posts from Caruso’s now-defunct blog that made derogatory references to “trannies,” “jewry,” and more. In one blog post titled “Tranny Paradise,” Carusone wrote about a Bangladesha man robbed by a “gang of tranvestites,” writing: “Did you notice the word attractive? What the f–k is that doing in there? Is the write[r] a tranny lover too? Or, perhaps he’s trying to justify how these trannies tricked this Bangladeshi in the first place? Look man, we don’t need to know whether or not they were attractive. The fucking guy was Bangladeshi,” Carusone wrote. “And while we’re out, what the hell was he doing with $7,300 worth of stuff. The guy’s Banladeshi! [sic]”

By the modern standards set by the likes of Media Matters, such a comment is punishable by death in the modern era (or at least they’d like it to be). Osnos offered no denunciation or response at all when reached for comment.

The article also contains errors that would’ve been uncovered with a few keystrokes – such as Osnos routinely confusing the news aggregator BonginoReport.com with this website (Bongino.com). Osnos quotes one professor Jennifer Mercieca as claiming that we launder ideas from people like Alex Jones through the website while providing zero examples of this (and there are none).  

Another lazy tactic of his is throwing out random allegations he acknowledges are unsubstantiated, presumably hoping some of his dopier readers will uncritically accept it. One example is the following passage:

Before long, Bongino’s posts were consistently in the top ten on Facebook. His competitor Ben Shapiro reportedly achieves big numbers by running a network of pages that disseminates his content—the social-media equivalent of buying your own book to get on the best-seller list—but Bongino denies employing such tricks.

An honest journalist (if they exist) would’ve just phased that as “there is no evidence Bongino does this” (because we don’t). Instead, he phrases it as if we’re on the defensive. It’s a common tactic one would expect from a talentless hack journo, of which there are many in the media (but Osnos denies employing such tricks).

Osnos is also extremely gullible (or is just playing dumb), citing one example of an obvious plant at a TPUSA conference as evidence that the right is planning violence:

A fanatically loyal audience can be very profitable—and, at times, very dangerous. During a public event in Idaho in October, the pro-Trump commentator Charlie Kirk was asked by a fan, “When do we get to use the guns?” The crowd tittered, and the fan continued, “I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk, who seemed to sense how poorly the moment was going to play on YouTube, interrupted him. “I’m going to denounce that,” he said. “We have to be the ones that do not play into the violent aims and ambitions of the other side.” Instead, he said, Idaho should ban vaccine mandates, eject some federal agencies, and “pick and choose” what federal laws it considers constitutional. When the man asked again when violence was required, Kirk urged him to be wary of abetting his opponents’ conspiracy: “They’re trying to get you to do something that then justifies what they actually want to do.”

It’s obvious to most that the person speaking was an infiltrator who aimed to make a comment so absurd only someone like Osnos would fall for it and report on it as serious. After all, if the person were actually a Trump supporter, leftist crazies would’ve plastered his name all over the internet within minutes of the exchange going viral.

To leave on a bright note: it looks like anyone can get a job as a journalist despite our nation’s economic woes.

Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros