Will The Press Survive The Russian Collusion Hoax?

Gloating? 

Some on the left accused those who felt vindicated by the Mueller Report of being just a little too happy Monday upon confirmation of what they already knew: that the President of the United States was not a traitor.

Of course he wasn’t.

Yet for the past two years Trump haters - egged on by over-hyped, erroneous stories in the press - insisted that the president was toast. He was a Russian asset, they said. He would never finish his term.

Turns out much of the Russia investigation was based on bogus information including a phony dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Justice Department should now start digging to see if laws were broken by members of the Obama administration who began pushing this fiction during the 2016 campaign.

Look, if you don’t like Trump, find someone decent to run against him. Enough with the attempted coups. This isn’t a banana republic.

Sadly, the real villains in this saga are members of the media. Almost all of them. Cable news talking heads, of course. And also the once-respected reporters at national newspapers. The Washington Post,  The New York Times, CNN, MSBNC and the networks merrily reported scores of unsubstantiated “if true” stories about Donald Trump that were supposedly leaked from those “close to the Mueller camp.”

They were mostly lies - some outrageous - followed by precious few corrections.

Here, have a gander at the Greek chorus of media knotheads predicting the president’s demise. Notice the complete lack of original thinking:

And it wasn’t just Trump who caused the press to abandon basic journalistic rules about getting it right.

Remember how the media - print and broadcast - jumped on the conservative Catholic kids from Covington High in January based on an incomplete video clip? Remember how they embraced the nutty Jussie Smollett story even though none of it passed the smell test?

It gives me no pleasure to write this, but I don’t trust the media. At all. I worked in journalism for 42 years. I was once proud of my profession. I remember stories that reporters toiled over for months but were never published because editors were unconvinced that the content was completely accurate.

That doesn’t happen often enough anymore.

I am embarrassed and horrified by the biased reporting that spews from nearly every outlet, especially as it relates to the Trump administration. 

Several courageous reporters have finally had enough.

Last week, for instance, former ABC news anchor Ted Koppel, who earned his chops reporting on the Iranian revolution, said that while some newspapers continue to do good work, objectivity is vanishing.

“...Koppel said President Trump is ‘not mistaken’ that the media is ‘out to get him’ in a discussion with Marvin Kalb at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Koppel said 'The New York Times' is ‘committed’ to making sure Trump is not elected and that the ‘liberal media’ have become part of "the resistance."

Lara Logan, former foreign correspondent for “60 Minutes,”  has emerged as a brutal critic of the liberal media.

“I didn’t even notice there was a bias in the media,” she confessed in a recent interview. “People would say it to me all the time and I argued passionately and ferociously against that because I really believed when we do it well, and the majority of serious journalists were all trying to do their best to overcome those biases and rely on the facts and good systems….(now journalistic)  standards are out the window. I mean, you read one story or another and hear it and it’s all based on one anonymous administration official, former administration official. That’s not journalism. That’s horseshit. Sorry. That is absolute horseshit.”

In a scathing takedown of the media, Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi compared the dutiful reporting about WMD that justified the Iraq War to the present-day truth-impaired assault on the president by the press.

Trump’s treatment may be the death knell for news, he said.

In fact, Taibbi was so incensed by the role of the press in the Russiagate hoax that he released a chapter from his not-yet-published book “Hate, Inc.,” that deals with reckless reporting.

“As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

“We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.”

With all due respect, Mr. Taibbi, it already has.