Media still can’t admit they got duped on Russia hoax
Conn Carroll
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Donald Trump has many faults, but that in no way excuses how the industries biggest brands, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, completely abandoned their journalistic standards when reporting on the former president.
Former New York Times investigative journalist Jeff Gerth has written a four-part, 24,000 word epic that details how the Democratic Party, their journalist allies, and government officials all conspired to create a false narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.
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You should definitely read the whole piece yourself. But the short version is that the Hillary Clinton campaign realized it had its own credibility problem on Russia (because of the Clinton Foundation’s many ties to the country), so they paid a Washington, D.C., “strategic intelligence” firm, Fusion GPS, to plant stories in the press making it seem that it was Trump, not Hillary, who had unsavory ties to the Kremlin.
Fusion GPS then created a dossier of salacious Russia-related stories about Trump, which it efficiently planted in news outlets in New York and Washington. Almost all of these stories would turn out to be completely untrue, but CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post published them anyway, because, as one source tells Gerth, “There was a feeding frenzy to try and be first with the story.”
David Corn of Mother Jones wrote a response to Gerth’s piece that is interesting only because of what it does not say. Nowhere in his short four-page reply does Corn deny any of the facts in Gerth’s story.
What Corn does do is try to change the subject. Corn believes that Trump, as a candidate, had the duty to admit that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee servers and released the DNC’s emails in order to help Trump beat Hillary.
This is ridiculous. It was the Hillary campaign that spent thousands of dollars creating and spreading false information about Trump’s relationship with Russia. Why should Trump be under any obligation to then admit that Russia was trying to help him? That would only further Hillary’s misinformation campaign about Trump.
The reality is that the media were so shocked by Trump’s win in 2016, that they were desperate to do anything to discredit it. How could the voters have chosen Trump over Hillary? There must have been foul play involved! Trump must have colluded with Russia to cheat!
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That is the mindset that led so many news outlets to abandon all their journalistic standards when it came to Trump.
Until CNN and the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the others look in the mirror and admit all that they got wrong during the Trump presidency, these institutions will continue to lose trust among voters, readers, and viewers.