The highly respected liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for his coverage of Edward Snowden and the NSA, was also banned by CNN. Instead, Zucker put on relics from the Watergate years such as Bernstein and former Nixon official and convicted felon John Dean to diagnose the president as mentally ill. Those has-beens had to keep the lie going if they wanted to be on the air.
But behind the scenes, the network knew the truth. CNN star Van Jones was caught on an undercover camera in 2017 by Project Veritas in its American Pravda series admitting that “the Russia thing is just a big nothingburger.” Jones later claimed that quote was taken out of context.115 But an undercover reporter also filmed CNN producer John Bonifield saying that the network’s Russia coverage was “mostly bullshit” but good for ratings and was being pushed on Zucker’s order.
What else could explain the network’s fascination with Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels and Julie Swetnick, the fantasist who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of participating in gang rape? Over a one-year period, Avenatti appeared on CNN 121 times, making the man Tucker Carlson had dubbed the “Creepy Porn Lawyer” a household name.116
Avenatti, celebrated by CNN as a possible 2020 candidate for president, photographed partying with CNN’s Don Lemon and April Ryan, saw his star crash when in March 2019 he was indicted by federal authorities on multiple counts, including attempting to extort $20 million from Nike, stealing from clients, committing bank and wire fraud, cheating on his taxes, and other crimes.117 The bad news multiplied when Avenatti was indicted two months later for stealing from his cohort in media hijinks, Stormy Daniels, who had propelled him to international fame. Accused of forging Daniels’s name to two payments for her book Full Disclosure, he pleaded not guilty to the charges.118 There was no mea culpa and accompanying apology from CNN to its viewers.
All along, the so-called legacy media were feeding the beast, from news reporters to opinion writers to editorial boards. The New York Times deliberately abandoned fairness and objectivity in its zeal to push the Russia story. Anonymous sources ran rampant, opinion bled into news stories, and always in the anti-Trump direction. That compelled others to follow. As Michael Goodwin of the New York Post put it, the Times “is the bell cow, and it led the media over the cliff by getting the big story wrong.”
Bashing Trump Is Good for Business
On March 7, 2019, the legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel stunned his colleagues during a televised discussion with colleague Marvin Kalb decrying the erosion of journalistic standards at the Times and WaPo. “[We’re] not talking about the New York Times of 50 years ago,” the former ABC star said. “We’re not talking about the Washington Post of 50 years ago. We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States.”119
A few months earlier, Koppel had pointed out in a public forum that CNN’s ratings would have been “in the toilet” without Trump. Now he argued that Trump was “not mistaken” that the media was out to get him. “We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were.”
Even Jill Abramson agreed. In Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, the former executive editor of the New York Times criticized her successor, Dean Baquet. “Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” she wrote. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”120
By abandoning the foundation of news reporting hewn to by the legendary publisher Adolph Ochs, “the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment, where the very definition of ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ was under constant assault.”121
A generational rupture at the Times, she said, manifested by the split in print and digital reporters, had created an environment in which younger staffers favored attacking the president. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures,” she wrote. “The dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards.”122
And bashing the president was great for the bottom line; subscriptions to the Times jumped by 600,000, to more than 2 million, in the first six months of Trump’s presidency.123 “Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative,” Abramson wrote. “They drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.”124
Even as stories blew up like clowns’ exploding cigars, the media clung to the belief that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would vindicate them by squeezing Trump’s colleagues, such as Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, to get to the truth about Trump-Russia “collusion,” setting up Trump’s removal from office. “An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable,” wrote Elizabeth Drew, a journalist who had covered Watergate, in an op-ed for the Times.125 The Atlantic featured a cover story in March 2019: “Impeach: It’s Time for Congress to Judge the President’s Fitness to Serve.”126
The Anti-Trump Narrative Is Funded by Millions of Dollars from “Nonpartisan” and Leftist Nonprofits
Many of the stories were being pushed by the Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP), a Washington-based nonprofit founded after the 2016 election by Democratic operative Daniel J. Jones, which hired Fusion GPS and Steele to continue the stealth campaign, according to an investigation by journalist Paul Sperry.127 TDIP is linked to several offshoots tasked to manipulate social media. The supposedly “nonpartisan” TDIP had raised $50 million from George Soros, the Hollywood activist Rob Reiner, a nonprofit linked to billionaire Tom Steyer, and other sources primarily in New York and California to go after Trump, according to a declassified congressional report.128
Jones was a former FBI analyst and top staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein, who had unilaterally released a transcript of a closed interview of Glenn Simpson without disclosing her aide’s connection to Fusion GPS.129 For TDIP, Jones set up an email distribution list for a newsletter of anti-Trump gossip, rumor, and innuendo blasted five days a week to reporters and Democratic aides on Capitol Hill. “What’s significant about them is they’re totally one-sided,” a veteran reporter with a major newspaper told Sperry. Working the national security beat, he insisted on anonymity. “It’s really just another way of adding fuel to the fire of the whole Russian collusion thing.”
According to Sperry, leaked texts from March 2017 revealed that Jones had boasted to a lawyer working with Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) that he had planted several anti-Trump articles with Reuters and McClatchy. “Jones has been chumming out his own share of garbage stories,” a Republican legislative assistant told Sperry.130
Similar pieces were promoted by Media Matters, the liberal activist group founded by David Brock that former 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan called “the most powerful propaganda organization” in the United States during an appearance on Fox & Friends on April 2, 2019. “And they describe themselves as a propaganda organization, that’s what they do,” she said. “They’re pushing their agenda. And one of the main pillars of their strategy is to make sure that Donald Trump is seen as the most unpopular president in history.”131
Media Matters targeted conservative media as well. In 2011, Brock had announced a campaign of “guerilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.132 With a generously funded budget, Brock’s staff of ninety people “smear, manipulate and invent false narratives driven by their well-funded political agenda,” Logan wrote in an op-ed for the New York Post. “With armies of bots and a stable of journalists that parrot their talking points, they silence and intimidate. They use our criticism of unfairness and bias to falsely accuse us of being conservative
.”133
The phony narratives being promoted about Trump-Russia “collusion” prompted Logan to give a podcast interview that she called “professional suicide for me.”134 She slammed reporters who rely on a single, anonymous government source. “That’s not journalism, that’s horseshit,” she said.
Elite Commentators Make Ludicrous Claims
The articles by supposedly serious journalists reached ludicrous levels. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a cover story in July 2018 about the upcoming summit between Trump and Putin with a teasing subtitle “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?”135 Chait suggested that “it would be dangerous not to consider the possibility that the summit is less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.” No evidence, just wild conjecture.
During his appearances on MSNBC, former CIA director turned pundit John Brennan used his former position to suggest that he’d seen collusive material that ordinary journalists had not. After Trump ordered that his security clearance be revoked, he penned an op-ed for the New York Times saying that “Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.”136 After the summit, Brennan pronounced his verdict in a tweet: “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of ‘treasonous.’ Not only were Trump’s comments ‘imbecilic,’ he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”137
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley followed Brennan’s lead on CNN. “The spirit of what Trump did is clearly treasonous. It’s a betrayal of the United States. He threw our U.S. intelligence services, flushed them away and it came off as being a puppet of Putin.”138 A historian might be more circumspect about the times the intelligence service has been wrong or simply lied to the people and the president. But not this historian.
Treason, of course, was legally preposterous, under both Article III of the Constitution and statutory law, 18 U.S.C. § 2381.139 But the word became a favorite cudgel for Trump critics to bludgeon the president for policy statements and conduct that do not fall under the law of treason.
The media loved booking the most flagrant huckster of hysteria in Congress, Representative Adam Schiff, who, as the ranking Democrat and later chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, received classified intelligence briefings. “I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” he said on Meet the Press in March 2017.140 He repeatedly trumpeted that he had seen incontrovertible “evidence” of collusion but repeatedly failed to produce any such evidence. In May 2018, Schiff told ABC that the nefarious connection between Trump and Russia was of “a size and scope probably beyond Watergate.”141 If pressed for further details by any reporter, he hid behind the supposedly “classified” nature of the evidence he claimed to have seen.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were just as bad if not as ubiquitous. “Enormous amounts of evidence” exist of collusion, said Senator Mark Warner. “There’s no one that could factually say there’s not plenty of evidence of collaboration or communications between Trump Organization and Russians.”142 Leaks from the House and Senate intelligence committees fueled numerous phony stories. Saying that Donald Trump, Jr., “went into the Senate Intelligence Committee, took an oath to tell the truth, and lied his butt off,” former federal prosecutor Paul Butler predicted that Mueller would indict the son on perjury charges to create leverage against his father.143 Except that there was no evidence that Don Jr. had lied, and he was not indicted.
The Senate hearings to confirm William Barr as attorney general brought another opportunity for media madness. Jonathan Turley, a commentator for Fox News, testified to the Senate that his longtime friend Barr was extraordinarily qualified to become attorney general again; he’d served in the same post under President George H. W. Bush. But the media attacked Barr over a well-reasoned twenty-page memo he’d written for the DOJ regarding executive power and Mueller’s investigation of Trump for obstruction of justice over his firing of Comey.144 Because it was favorable to Trump, they called his opinion “bizarre” and “strange,” alleging that it was “based entirely on made-up facts.”
“These criticisms were wrong,” Turley wrote. “Many of these same critics have explored the same possible use of the law against the obstruction of justice before and after Barr’s memo came out.” But now that Barr was likely to be confirmed as attorney general and might not be a rabid “Never Trumper,” he had to be attacked.145
A good example of the Twitter echo chamber came in August 2018 after the man who had investigated both Clinton and Trump was discharged. Trump tweeted: “Fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok is a fraud, as is the rigged investigation he started. There was no Collusion or Obstruction with Russia, and everybody, including the Democrats, know it. The only Collusion and Obstruction was by Crooked Hillary, the Democrats and the DNC.”146
Chuck Todd, NBC’s Meet the Press moderator, condemned Trump with borderline hysteria, tweeting “I wonder if other civil servants who believe they have seen wrongdoing are watching how POTUS and his echo chamber can character assassinate so viciously and get second thoughts about doing their job given the risk POTUS is showcasing to anyone who crosses him?”147 Perhaps Todd had been asleep for a year and was unfamiliar with the loathing and scheming by Strzok and his lover, Lisa Page, explicitly revealed in their texts, to take Trump down. It seems as though only those conspiring to lie to the media and their colleagues have something to worry about.
Strzok had been justifiably fired by FBI deputy director David Bowdich, the most senior career official in the agency. Legal analyst and former FBI official Chuck Rosenberg told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that “as much as I like Peter Strzok, he exhibited remarkably bad judgment. . . . It’s not a crazy decision. In fact, I understand why Bowdich did it.”148
But Todd saw only what he wanted to see. He should have taken the time to read Strzok’s texts, which had been included in the report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, released a few months earlier. On August 8, 2016, Lisa Page texted Strzok, “[Trump’s] not ever going to be president, right, right?” Strzok, the upstanding civil servant, texted back, “No, no he won’t. We’ll stop it.”149
The media’s endless supply of anti-Trump stories—often accompanied by the qualifier “if true!”—reached a fever pitch by early 2019. From January 20, 2017, through March 21, 2019, the evening news shows of ABC, NBC, and CBS produced a combined 2,284 minutes of “collusion” coverage, roughly three minutes a night for 791 days.150 And the coverage was consistently over 90 percent negative.
A few people tried to slam on the brakes. In February 2019, NBC News reporter Ken Dilanian reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee had, after two years and interviews with more than two hundred witnesses, found “no direct evidence” of collusion between Trump and Russia.151 Though guests on an MSNBC panel expressed skepticism, Trump could claim vindication, Dilanian warned, “and he’ll be partially right.”
Terry Moran, ABC TV’s senior national correspondent, predicted a “reckoning” for those who had staked their credibility on Mueller validating their reporting. “That’s a reckoning for progressives and Democrats who hoped that Mueller would essentially erase the 2016 election, it’s a reckoning for the media, it’s a reckoning around the country if, in fact, after all this time, there was no collusion.”152
As it became clear that Mueller was closing up shop, anonymous Democratic lawmakers told Politico their prediction that the special counsel’s report “will be a dud.”153 But the mania among the media who had invested so much in the narrative for more than two years didn’t diminish.
Bombshell after bombshell, night after night: the “noose is tightening around Trump’s neck . . . the walls are closing in . . . the beginning of the end . . . the tipping point . . . Trump will resign . . . like the last days of Nixon . . . his presidency is crippled . . . Trump’s going down . . . I do
not think the president will serve out his term . . . it’s over . . . another bombshell!”
The Mueller Report Shatters the Media Narrative
No one bit on the Russia “collusion” bait with more gusto than Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s star anchor, paid $7 million a year. She pounded the story relentlessly, using wild graphics to connect the dots of bizarre “collusion” theories, like Mel Gibson’s character in the movie Conspiracy Theory.
Her ratings surged to 4 million viewers who tuned in to hear their Trump hatred reinforced. With her help, MSNBC reaped a 62 percent bump in viewership during 2017.154 By February 2019, Maddow’s show had been number one in her time slot for three straight months in the coveted demographic of adults ages twenty-five to fifty-four. During the weeks before the anticipated release of the Mueller Report, Maddow gleefully predicted that Trump would finally be exposed by the intrepid special counsel and summarily frog-marched out of the White House.
On Friday, March 22, when the Mueller Report dropped, Maddow was trout fishing in Tennessee and raced to a local newsroom for the big reveal.155 As she reported the news that her hero Mueller had found no collusion and would file no more indictments, her eyes seemed to tear up and her mouth twisted into a grimace.
“This is the start of something, not the end of something,” she insisted, gasping like a fish hooked and plopped onto a pier. However, there was no escaping the fact that the narrative she’d hyped for over two years had been an elaborate hoax. She had relished every twist and turn, staking her credibility and career on the outcome. And now it was in tatters. Her show shed a half-million viewers the following week. Though she plays one on TV, Maddow is no journalist; she’s a pundit, an entertainer weaving elaborate tales that defy facts and logic.
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