In the aftermath of the release of the Mueller report, news media agencies have engaged in retrospectives about their coverage of the Russia collusion investigation. These circle-the wagons analyses have ranged from “we did a good job” to “we did a really good job.” Thus, based on their behavior so far, Trump foe Matt Taibbi, a contributing editor for the far-left Rolling Stone magazine, expects that media outlets will learn nothing from what he described as the Russiagate fiasco.
“You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three yearschasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this. He didn’t just ‘fail to establish’ evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: ‘They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.’
“Not only was there no ‘collusion,’ the two camps didn’t even have each others’ phone numbers!
“In other words, all those fancy org charts were meaningless. Because there was no conspiracy, all those ‘walls are closing in’ reports — and there were a ton of them — were wrong. We were told we’d hit ‘turning point’ after ‘turning point’ leading to the ‘the beginning of the end,’ with Trump certain, soon, to either resign in shame, Nixon-style, or be impeached….
“The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the ‘highly questionable’ document ‘needs to be investigated.’ The Times similarly is reporting, two-plus years late, that ‘people familiar’ with Steele’s work began to have ‘misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public….’
“Reporters are going to insist all they did was accurately report the developments of a real investigation….
“They’ll also claim they didn’t spend years openly rooting for indictment and impeachment via wish-casted predictions disguised as reporting and commentary, or denouncing people who doubted the conspiracy as spies and Putin apologists, or clearing their broadcast panels and op-ed pages of skeptics while giving big stages to craven conspiracy-spinners…
“The Mueller report makes clear reporters were sold wolf whistles over and over, led by reams of unnamed official sources who urged them to see meaning in meaningless things and assume connections that weren’t there…
“Reporters should be furious about being fed these red herrings… But they’re not mad, which makes it look like a case of intentional blindness, in which eyes and ears were shut among other things because the Trump-Russia conspiracy tale made a ton of money.
“This fiasco will surely end up being a net plus for Trump. The obstruction parts of the report make him look like a brainless goon and thug, but the absence of what Mueller repeatedly calls ‘underlying crime’ make his ravings about an elitist mob out to get him look justified. This is not an easy thing to achieve, but we’re there, and the press is a big part of that picture.
“News audiences were betrayed, and sooner or later, even the most virulently Trump-despising demographics will realize it and tune us out. The only way to reverse the damage is to own how big of a screw-up this was, but after the last three years, who would hold their breath waiting for that?
Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, and just a handful of others were the only journalists on the left questioning the Russia collusion narrative. The media in America is merely an extension of the Democrat Party or vice versa. Aiding and abetting the media, the Never Trumpers, i.e., those pundits who put the “con” in conservative, did and will do anything for a paycheck from a three-letter network.
While the Obama-worshipping, anti-TrumpRolling Stone famously reported (and then retracted) a fake news story about a University of Virginia campus rape, it did give Taibbi a platform to opine on the Russiagate hoax.
Added law professor Glenn Reynolds in USA Today, “One of the great legacies of the Trump Administration is the extent to which it has revealed that huge swathes of our national establishment, in government, the media, and elsewhere, are both hopelessly partisan and frighteningly incompetent. Buckle up, because all the evidence is that the establishment hasn’t learned its lesson yet.”
Collusion Coverup
While pushing the Russia witch hunt, the mainstream media has generally and hypocritically ignored that Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign with a paid-for fake Russian dossier (the Steele dossier) to spy on the Trump campaign. Allegations have also emerged that the Ukranian government colluded with the Democrats against Trump. Ex-VP Joe Biden, a new entrant into the presidential sweepstakes, also has some explaining to do over his alleged financial ties to Ukraine. Plus, Obama and Clinton approved the sale of 20 percent of U.S. uranium to Russia.
Some observers have even claimed that the Mueller team, packed with Clinton and Obama-supporting prosecutors, held the report until after the 2018 midterm elections as way to collude with House Democrats.
Witch Hunt Whiplash
Writing in the otherwise Never Trump National Review, Conrad Black claims that justice will be done:
“The Democrats are pretending that their fraudulent attempt at what amounted to a coup d’état against the election of an administration of the other party still possesses the legitimacy to be continued and taken seriously after it has been largely unmasked by its own chosen investigators for what it was.
At the same time, the machinery of dispassionate justice is already turning towards the identification and eventual punishment of the Democrats for subverting the justice and intelligence apparatus of the former administration in order to influence the results of the election of the succeeding president and vice president of the United States. It is an elemental rule of nature that the longer and the more febrile the efforts of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the Democratic party generally, abetted by their media echo chamber, to delay the exposure of their wrongdoing, the more complete and overwhelming the defeat and discreditation of the entire effort to destroy the Trump administration will be.”
