Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed
by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this
story) is now larger than his original base. As [Peter] Baker notes [in the New York Times], a full
50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.” ...
The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump
paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this
business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any
reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so. ...
CNN
told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians
known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA ["former" communist John Brennan], who’d
helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said
the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing
acts “nothing short of treasonous.” ...
[N]ews outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign,
only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the
recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran
understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.” Of
course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there
should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this
story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t
confirm. ...
The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident. Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way. ...
We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an
independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.
