RussiaGate wasn’t a media “failure,” it was a success
RussiaGate wasn’t a media “failure,” it was a success
If you look at it dispassionately — as if you were analyzing the politics of someplace far away like, say, late Romanov Russia — it’s easy to see how RussiaGate has been a success.
For two long years, our news media has obsessively driven a xenophobic Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
Day after day, we’ve heard almost nothing but “collusion.” Didn’t matter if it was the New York Times, the Washington Post, Mother “Alex” Jones, the Atlantic, NPR, MSNBC, or CNN — our news media presented a unified conspiracy front. The Democratic Party fundraised off of it. Everyone was dead certain that “the Russians” were behind Donald Trump’s presidency. Everyone was sure that Robert Mueller’s team was going to deliver indictments showing what every spy and serious person already seemed to know was true: top Trump cronies, and probably even Trump himself, had conspired with a hostile power and engaged in all sorts of treasonous quid pro quo deals to steal the most powerful office in the world. How else could Trump have won, if not with the help of a shadowy foreign threat from the east?
And then it all came crashing down…
Now, following the meltdown of RussiaGate, some of the journalists who had critically covered RussiaGate (and there were only a handful) have been hoping that that this epic journalistic failure will serve as a teachable moment for our media establishment. Maybe mainstream journalists will finally abandon their spy-fed screeching about the “Russian threat” and focus on important issues that are impacting the lives of real Americans?
Well, I’m not that optimistic.