Baseless conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence

As a life-long news junkie, I've noticed that there has been a recent trend in many supposed news stories to include some version of this heading embedded either in the title or the body of the story. This is particularly noticeable in coverage of Team Trump's various challenges to the November election and also in reportage of competing pandemic narratives. In both cases there is an official narrative, and any deviation therefrom is inevitably "baseless conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence."

This marks an evolution in how news is presented. Where were the "without a shred of evidence" disclaimers when our "legitimate" news outlets were regaling us with yarns about Saddam's nukes or Qaddafi's rape squads? Perhaps a note of caution injected into those scary stories could have slowed the march to war on those countries.

Likewise, our truth-tellers in the mainstream media never asterisked four years of Russiagate hysteria with that disclaimer. Any anonymous leak from the "intelligence community" that served to obstruct Trump was presented as gospel, when in reality they actually were baseless conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence.

I ran into the phrase this morning in this CBC story about billionaire and Clinton crony Frank Giustra, one of the biggest donors to various Clinton "philanthropies." Unpaid intern Jason Proctor lays it out in his opening sentence;

West Vancouver billionaire Frank Giustra has been given the go-ahead to sue Twitter in a B.C. courtroom over the social media giant's publication of a series of tweets tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Hmm... "...tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings..."

Sorry, what ties Giustra to those baseless conspiracy theories are stories like this one from The Guardian, and this from CNBC. 

Seems there was this sociopathic pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein. He was an actual convicted pedophile who cultivated the who's who of America's political elite. He is believed to have continued both his diddling and his cultivating until ending it all in a spasm of remorse in a NYC prison last year.

There's an old folk maxim we're all familiar with; you are judged by the company you keep. That Giustra kept company with folks who ran with Epstein doesn't prove him guilty of anything, of course.

But the "pedos in high places" story would seem a long way from "baseless conspiracy theory."