But somehow the crack Pulitzer Prize–winning uber-objective reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post had missed the story of the biggest political hoax in the history of the United States. They had swallowed Hillary’s Big Lie, with the help of Fusion GPS, the FBI, and former intelligence officials. Michael Goodwin of the New York Post wrote a column titled “The New York Times Owes Americans a Big, Fat Apology.”156
The announcement by Attorney General Barr that Mueller had found no “collusion” came as a “thunderclap to the mainstream news outlets and the cadre of mostly liberal-leaning commentators who have spent months emphasizing the possible collusion narrative,” wrote WaPo media critic Paul Farhi.157 The New York Times’ “conservative” columnist David Brooks, who had hyped the hoax with the rest, had the grace to suggest Trump was owed an apology in a column titled “We’ve All Just Made Fools of Ourselves—Again.”158
“It’s clear that many Democrats made grievous accusations against the president that are not supported by the evidence. . . . If you call someone a traitor and it turns out you lacked the evidence for that charge, then the only decent thing to do is apologize.” But Brooks meant people like Brennan and Schiff, not himself or his newspaper.
Charles Hurt of the Washington Times singled out Michael Isikoff and David Corn for well-deserved scorn. Early promoters of the hoax, they had coauthored a book entitled Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, which had regurgitated the Steele “dossier.”159 “No two people have done more than these two buffoons to peddle fantasy claims, unfounded conspiracy theories and outright lies regarding President Trump’s supposed collusion with the Kremlin,” Hurt wrote.160 Their book title had been “entirely fitting considering who wound up getting their heads blown off in the whole misadventure.”
The once-respected Isikoff didn’t apologize, but he found a spine at last. On an MSNBC panel with Corn and Chris Hayes, he acknowledged that Mueller’s findings had obliterated the reliability of the “dossier,” which he had so avidly promoted for more than two years. “You know, it was endorsed on multiple, multiple times on this network, people saying it’s more and more proving to be true, and it wasn’t,” he said.161 But Corn was still reluctant to give up the Holy Grail of Russian “collusion.” He probably never will. A few days later, he published a story with this headline: “Trump Aided and Abetted Russia’s Attack. That was Treachery. Full Stop.”162
Leftist Journalists Refuse to Admit They Were Wrong
What can a cult leader do when his predictions about the world ending fail to come true? Pick a new date and prophecy. Television producers found people willing to come on and engage in the most brazen attempts at goalpost moving ever seen on the little screen.
John Dean of Watergate infamy claimed that the Mueller Report hadn’t resolved whether or not the president was a Russian agent.163 Jonathan Chait was at it again, contending that Trump could still be guilty. “People who want to demonstrate their innocence make displays of cooperation with investigators,” he wrote. “His flamboyant refusal to cooperate deprives Trump of any claim to have been cleared.”164 Except that Trump and his lawyers had provided unprecedented access to mountains of documents; staffers and lawyers had submitted to hours of interviews with Mueller’s team. Dowd, President Trump’s attorney, had given a remarkable interview to Byron York outlining his interactions with the special counsel.
Despite Trump blasting Mueller on Twitter and decrying the investigation as a “witch hunt,” behind the scenes, Trump’s people were cooperating. “Bob [Mueller] was a big boy about the political side,” Dowd told York. “He understood the president had to address the politics of it. He couldn’t just say nothing. People were pounding him about this thing every day, both privately and publicly.”165 The special counsel’s office even used “code” to let the president’s lawyer know when a press report about something allegedly emanating from Mueller’s team was false.166
With the help of useful tools like Corn, Dean, and Chait, the press had played an indispensable role in promulgating the largest disinformation operation in US history. The media “rolled right into an absolutely deranged conspiracy territory that held the country hostage for two years,” said Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist. “It is shocking how many people believed this crazy theory about Russia collusion, but many people lacked the courage to speak against it in the face of hysteria.”167
Among them, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC websites had published 8,507 articles mentioning the Mueller investigation, according to the Republican National Committee.168 The RNC is a pro-Trump source, but no one could seriously dispute the sheer magnitude of the resources poured into promulgating the hoax.
In Tablet, an American Jewish online magazine, writer Lee Smith called the debacle an “extinction level event” for the media. “The farce that passed for public discourse the last two years was fueled by a concerted effort of the media and the pundit class to obscure gaping holes in logic as well as law,” Smith wrote. “And yet they all appeared to be credible because the institutions sustaining them are credible.”169
Instead of apologies and soul-searching mea culpas, the self-serving excuses began. “I’m comfortable with our coverage,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said. “It is never our job to determine illegality, but to expose the actions of people in power. And that’s what we and others have done and will continue to do.”170
Sure, line by line, most of what the newspaper had reported was true. But how can it feel comfortable with missing the bigger story: a former CIA director attempting to take down a sitting president? On Meet the Press, John Brennan had boldly thrown down the gauntlet: “I called [Trump’s] behavior treasonous, which is to betray one’s trust and aid and abet the enemy, and I stand very much by that claim.”171 Now revealed as a fabulist who had had a large hand in spreading the conspiracy theories, Brennan blamed his despicable denunciations of Trump on “bad information,” as if he had gotten a few details wrong.172
“I am relieved that it’s been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election,” he said on MSNBC. “I think that is good news for the country. I still point to things that were done publicly, or efforts to try to have conversations with the Russians that were inappropriate, but I’m not at all surprised that the high bar of criminal conspiracy was not met.” In spook speak, that’s called CYA. That that sordid man was once the director of the CIA is a shocking indictment of Barack Obama’s administration.
Lester Holt of NBC tackled the other prevaricator who had feasted on the rotting corpse of the collusion narrative. On tour to promote his self-aggrandizing book, James Comey was repeatedly asked if the Russians had something on Trump. He offered the same incendiary answer, knowing it would lead news reports: “I think it’s possible.”173 Comey had led the media down the “collusion” path with classified memo bread crumbs that had triggered the special counsel appointment. Now, asked by Holt if he saw the results of Mueller’s investigation as a rebuke of his leadership of the FBI and its role in the catastrophe, Comey shamelessly tried to spin: “No, I actually see it the other way. It establishes, I hope, to all people, no matter where they are on the spectrum, that the FBI is not corrupt, not a nest of vipers and spies, but an honest group of people trying to find out what is true. That’s what you see here.”
No, what we see is an unscrupulous and unprincipled leaker who, in the words of “Jason Beale,” a pseudonym for a retired US Army interrogator, created a “$25 million, two-year hostage crisis, wherein the president of the United States’ political and foreign policy agenda was handcuffed by an investigation he repeatedly told us was unnecessary and unjust.”174
During an interview with White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, CNN’s Jake Tapper defended his network: “I’m not sure what you’re saying the media got wrong. The media reported that an investigation was g
oing on. Other than the people in the media on the left, not on this network, I don’t know anybody who got anything wrong. We didn’t say there was conspiracy. We said that Mueller was investigating conspiracy.”175
Not much evidence of soul-searching there.
Tapper had conveniently forgotten CNN’s long record of screw-ups and fake scoops. Viewers remembered. The network lost one-third of its prime-time audience and more than half of its viewers in the coveted younger demographic.176
Anchor Chris Cuomo also refused to accept that CNN had had any responsibility for its distorted coverage and the collapse of the public’s trust in media. “For the first time in our history you have a president who tells everybody that the media is their enemy and that the institutions of our democracy can’t be trusted,” he insisted in a heated interview with Representative Sean Duffy (R-WI).177 “But if the media was doing its job they would be far more skeptical of some of the details that they got,” Duffy shot back. That was exactly what Trump had been saying since the election—and it had turned out that he was correct.
CNN president Jeff Zucker didn’t apologize. He puffed out his chest and proclaimed, “We are not investigators. We are journalists and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did. A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”178 In other words, we accepted bogus information from manipulative dirty cops and partisan hacks attempting to destroy a duly elected president and never noticed because we didn’t investigate it. CNN wasted no time ginning up new angles: “Trump Moves to Weaponize Mueller Findings.”179
Over at MSNBC, anchor Katy Tur dismissed the fuss over the result of the Mueller investigation by stressing that several dozen people, including Paul Manafort, had been indicted for crimes. “Let’s just put on the screen of everybody who’s been found guilty or already indicted in the Mueller investigations,” Tur said. “Lots of faces, lots of pleas, and lots of indictments.” Of course, none of them was guilty of the crime Mueller was supposedly appointed to investigate. That bothered Tur not at all.180
The New York Times had the audacity to print an op-ed titled “Trump’s Shamelessness Was Outside Mueller’s Jurisdiction,” by Bob Bauer, who was identified as a “professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University School of Law.”181 The Times failed, however, to point out that until May 2018, Bauer had been a partner at Perkins Coie, in the firm’s “political law practice,” and was still representing certain of the law firm’s clients.182 Hiding the fact that the op-ed had been written by an attorney with the firm involved in originating the hoax was dishonest.
But honest reporters who had remained skeptics refused to let them off the hook. “Check every MSNBC personality, CNN ‘law expert,’ liberal-centrist outlets and #Resistance scam artist and see if you see even an iota of self-reflection, humility or admission of massive error,” tweeted Greenwald.183 “While standard liberal outlets obediently said whatever they were told by the CIA and FBI, many reporters at right-wing media outlets which are routinely mocked by super-smart liberals as primitive and propagandistic did relentlessly great digging and reporting.”
He singled out Maddow for criticism, saying she “went on the air for 2 straight years & fed millions of people conspiratorial garbage & benefited greatly.”184 Greenwald praised Tucker Carlson of Fox News, in particular, for letting his audience hear both sides of the story. “MSNBC did the exact opposite,” Greenwald said on Carlson’s show. The network “should have their top hosts on prime time go before the cameras and hang their head in shame and apologize for lying to people for three straight years, exploiting their fears to great profit. These are people who were on the verge of losing their jobs. That whole network was about to collapse. This whole scam saved them. And not only did they constantly feed people, for three straight years, total disinformation, they did it on purpose.”185
Tim Graham, the director of media analysis for the conservative-leaning Media Research Center, also had harsh words for the mainstream media: “So now it’s apparent the news channels merely channeled their wishful thinking. They had a grand denouement in mind and it didn’t happen. They mocked Trump for saying ‘no collusion,’ and that ended up being the truth. . . . The voters should feel punked, swindled.”186
“Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media,” wrote Matt Taibbi. “Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population.”187
Though former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson had not joined the anti-Trump bandwagon, on behalf of her colleagues she wrote “Apologies to President Trump,” published by The Hill, which is worth quoting at length:188
Whatever his supposed flaws, the rampant accusations and speculation that shrouded Trump’s presidency, even before it began, ultimately have proven unfounded. Just as Trump said all along. Yet each time Trump said so, some of us in the media lampooned him.
We treated any words he spoke in his own defense as if they were automatically to be disbelieved because he had uttered them. Some even declared his words to be “lies,” although they had no evidence to back up their claims. We in the media allowed unproven charges and false accusations to dominate the news landscape for more than two years, in a way that was wildly unbalanced and disproportionate to the evidence. We did a poor job of tracking down leaks of false information. We failed to reasonably weigh the motives of anonymous sources and those claiming to have secret, special evidence of Trump’s “treason.”
As such, we reported a tremendous amount of false information, always to Trump’s detriment. And when we corrected our mistakes, we often doubled down more than we apologized. We may have been technically wrong on that tiny point, we would acknowledge. But, in the same breath, we would insist that Trump was so obviously guilty of being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet that the technical details hardly mattered. So, a round of apologies seem in order.
The Donald J. Trump for President Campaign released a memo to “Television Producers” after the news that Mueller had found no collusion regarding the “credibility of certain guests.”189 It named Schiff, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Representative Eric Swalwell, DNC Chairman Tom Perez, and John Brennan as among the most aggressive spreaders of false information on Trump-Russia “collusion.” The memo suggested that producers ask a basic question: “Does this guest warrant further appearances in our programming, given the outrageous and unsupported claims made in the past?” If they do reappear, “you should play the prior statements and challenge them to provide the evidence which prompted them to make the wild claims in the first place.” Of course, TV producers were highly offended—and continued to book the same guests, especially Schiff, who didn’t miss a beat, peddling the same discredited nonsense about “collusion.”
“But the media question of the day is why members of the press corps aren’t deciding on their own to reject the source who seems to have been misleading them for years,” wrote James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal.190 “One might expect any reasonable person, journalist or not, to stop providing a platform to someone who had gone two full years without backing up a sensational claim.” That would include people such as Malcolm Nance, the author of The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Disarming the West191 and a former intelligence officer, who went on MSNBC the day after Barr’s statement with a hysterical rant: “Everyone repeat after me—single most serious scandal in the history of the United States—was the president of the United States an agent of an enemy of the United States? Look. This—it could technically eclipse Benedict Arnold, who at least did it for money.”192 Nance will always be welcome on MSNBC as long as
he keeps up the anti-Trump rhetoric, no matter how nutty he sounds.
Maddow’s reputation crumbled. She won “The Worst!” crown in the New York Post’s “Mueller Madness” bracket game, getting more than twice as many votes as other serial offenders such as Brennan and Avenatti.193 “I’m a liberal who loved her show a few years back,” wrote one reader, “but the lack of skepticism and the unfortunate shift from fact-based reporting to hysteria was shocking.” Within days, Maddow was back to whipping up new conspiracy theories. Fans who hate Trump will forgive her.
“Maddow viewers absolutely had the expectation that Mueller would find that Trump had colluded with Russia,” wrote Caleb Howe for Mediaite. “And now, they don’t feel that she led them astray. They believe that, because reality did not meet expectation, reality must have been tampered with. Because that’s how conspiracy theories work. It’s dot-connecting and innuendo and ultimately more theory to explain the theory.”194
Like many journalists, Maddow believes in her own righteousness. “They buy their own PR about being the last line of defense, the noblest and most self-sacrificing profession, speaking truth to power,” Howe wrote. “Being a check on power is the distilled value of the profession. . . . That belief in one’s own nobility and righteousness, and unquenchable thirst to display it and be seen as it, is the biggest problem of all.”195
The Media’s Future
Bizarrely, the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC ramped up talk of “impeachment” after Mueller’s report announced that it had found no evidence of collusion, according to a Media Research Center report. “Despite the Mueller report’s lack of an anti-Trump smoking gun, the broadcast networks actually became more invested in the Russia story,” wrote MRC senior editor Rich Noyes. “TV news viewers heard three times as many references to ‘impeachment’ compared to before Mueller concluded there was no campaign conspiracy with Russia, while making no determination about potential obstruction of justice.”196
Witch Hunt Page 33