A new poll released by the Gallup and Knight Foundation indicates that America has a low regard for the news media, with only 26 percent having a favorable impression of the journalism industry.

It’s no wonder perhaps, particularly given the way corporate news outlets, with their irrational, politized vendetta against the 45th president, wasted a tremendous amount of bandwidth on the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

Instapundit‘s Glenn Reynolds often refers to journalists as “Democrat activists with bylines.”

In that context, the prestigious (at least in liberal circles) Columbia Journalism Review has published a thorough examination of how the media handled Russiagate, a yarn prompted by a bogus, tawdry dossier, and it’s not pretty.

It’s a long slog to get through the 24.000-word, four-part article called “the press versus the president,” but to some degree it even downplays the media malpractice or malfeasance. Even with subtle anti-Trump subtext, the article is well-worth reading if you have the time.

The New York Times seems to come off as the worst offender, with most of the rest of the left-wing media tagging along in giving a megaphone to a make-believe conspiracy that undermined the Trump administration.

Keep in mind that this is the same censorship-loving, conspiracy-mongering, fact-check-failing media that bemoans misinformation and repeatedly slanders others who don’t go along with its narrative as, ironically, conspiracy theorists, or worse.

Gerth writes that “But outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.”

One revelation is that even the anti-Trump, higher-ups at the FBI criticized the misleading reporting in Russiagate-related stories.

Former Times reporter Jeff Gerth, who wrote the girthy retrospective, among other things highlights the errors of omission that made Trump look bad.

As the article recalls, and you may have felt this way at the time, Trump didn’t do himself any favors when he joked about asking Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 emails. Whether you like him or not, anyone with common sense knew that Trump was obviously being playful and sarcastic, but he unfortunately was dealing with a humorless, self-righteous media on high alert to assist the Hilary Clinton presidential campaign.

Parenthetically, even the mainstream or legacy media admitted to the role of the Clinton campaign in the fabricated file “The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said,” the Washington Post reported back in October 2017.”

About a year ago, CNN reported that “Federal election regulators fined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee earlier this month for not properly disclosing the money they spent on controversial opposition research that led to the infamous Trump-Russia dossier.”

As part of his summary, Gerth asserted the following:

My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences.

One traditional journalistic standard that wasn’t always followed in the Trump-Russia coverage is the need to report facts that run counter to the prevailing narrative…My final concern, and frustration, was the lack of transparency by media organizations in responding to my questions… not a single major news organization made available a newsroom leader to talk about their coverage. 

In part one, Gerth claims that “Trump and his acolytes in the conservative media fueled the ensuing political storm, but the hottest flashpoints emerged from the work of mainstream journalism. The two most inflammatory, and enduring, slogans commandeered by Trump in this conflict were ‘fake news’ and the news media as ‘the enemy of the American people.’ They both grew out of stories in the first weeks of 2017 about Trump and Russia that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public.”

While demanding accountability from everyone else, the media hasn’t acknowledged its own responsibility for its egregious Russiagate errors, which hardly bodes well for the 2024 election cycle, Gerth implied.

So far, few news organizations have reckoned seriously with what transpired between the press and the presidency during this period. That failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.

Gerth also touched on the way the media approached the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and its associated allegations of overseas influence peddling — which so-called intelligence officials falsely blamed on Russian disinformation — a story that Big Tech censored in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

Reporters who ferreted out the details of the FBI inquiry into Trump’s campaign couldn’t, or wouldn’t, confirm the Justice Department investigation into the future president’s son.

Reacting to Gerth’s detailed presentation, Russiagate expert Mark Hemingway observed the following, in part, at Real Clear Politics:

If CJR is finally comfortable admitting that the media’s Russiagate reporting was so scandalously bad that it damns the entire industry, that seems like a remarkable admission….

It’s also understandable why Gerth would want to keep his report narrowly focused on the facts of what transpired. But without any substantive discussion of the media’s motives it’s hard to draw any important lessons from this sorry saga. Gerth does point out that Russiagate has led to an erosion of trust in the media and offers a pallid warning that the media’s “failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.”

But this is inadequate. Devoid of any broader context about the long history manipulations of America’s national security state or the corporate media’s evolution into ham-fisted left-wing ideologues, one can read Gerth’s dry reporting as a comedy of errors: A bunch of well-intentioned reporters, faced with the challenge of covering a problematic president – and disingenuous Democrats and partisan law enforcement officials – kept bungling the reporting, by getting key facts wrong  and committing serious sins of omission.

However, the missing motive suggests something far more sinister…Yet, when “deep state” actors with an obvious animus for Donald Trump pushed the narrative that a sitting U.S. president was compromised by a foreign power, a story so explosive it demanded to be thoroughly vetted every step of the way, the mainstream media instead decided to become stenographers…

So while Gerth’s careful reporting is noted and appreciated, it is unlikely to produce the kind of self-examination and reckoning necessary to restore trust in the media and the vital role they play in the democratic process. By getting away with it, the media learned all the wrong lessons.

Former CNN employee Steve Krakauer, the author of a new book about media bias, declared on Tuesday the following:

As bad as so much of the Trump Era reporting was, what took place with the Hunter Biden laptop story and the New York Post censorship at the end of his presidency was perhaps the most egregious and obvious example of the elite censorship collusion racket between tech companies, government forces and the national media that we’ve ever seen. We have seen now through the Twitter Files revelations that there was specific cooperation between Twitter and the FBI in the important months and weeks before the laptop story broke…

In the intervening years, outlets like the New York Times and CNN would go on to “verify” the original Hunter Biden laptop reporting. They eventually told their audience the truth – long after it was no longer relevant.”

Added: Tablet Magazine staff writer Armin Rosen implies that Gerth missed the bigger picture:

[I]t was apparently too self-incriminating for a watchdog like CJR to explain that there were writers outside the establishment media who documented Russiagate’s interrelated, mutually reinforcing failures of journalism and law-enforcement—and did it while these failures were actually happening…

The media actually has learned a lesson from Russiagate, hinted at in CJR’s refusal to acknowledge the people and outlets who got the story right from the very beginning. The lesson is that serious self-reflection should be avoided at all costs. And why not? For much of the media, Russiagate was a rousing success: It kept everyone busy and motivated, and it saved a dying business model (one interesting detail in Gerth’s story is that the American media produced over a half-million articles or television segments about Russiagate)…

There will be no serious self-exploration of the media’s Russiagate misdeeds. The American news industry traded away its credibility but is too satisfied with whatever money and sense of purpose it got in return to demand that much of itself.

Rosen also noted that “Thanks to [Lee] Smith, [Eli] Lake, Techno Fog, and numerous others whom Gerth ignores, we’ve known for years that the media worked in concert with a political comms firm and elements of federal law enforcement and the intelligence community to peddle an incorrect theory about a secret deal between an enemy of the United States and an American presidential candidate they all didn’t like.”