Networks bury explosive Russiagate revelations after they hyped the hoax
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii now serving in the Trump administration. She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020. If the parties and election results were reversed, and a Republican congresswoman had joined the Kamala Harris administration, the liberal media elites would have found her courageous and fascinating, like a Liz Cheney-style figure.
So, when Gabbard released new documents showing the Obama administration manufactured intelligence to frame incoming President Donald Trump as the illegitimate beneficiary of Russian collusion in the 2016 election, the media treated it like toxic waste. Any press event designed to please Trump was automatically dismissed as the craven act of a loyalist kissing up to the Big Boss.
The nightly newscasts of ABC and NBC skipped it. CBS gave it 41 seconds. The next day, CBS and NBC reported on Gabbard suspiciously on the morning shows. NBC’s Garrett Haake denounced "Tulsi Gabbard attempting to rewrite the history of Russia's 2016 election interference, accusing former President Obama without evidence of manipulating intelligence." She brought evidence, and they still scream "without evidence."
When Team Trump releases old documents, it’s partisan. It’s weaponized. It’s a desperate distraction. When the Democrat elites and the media conspired to release damaging allegations about Trump, it’s presented to the public as nonpartisan, as democracy in action, and anything but a distraction. It’s the main event. It’s bait for the Emmys, the Peabody Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes.
For Democratic politicians, the media engage in damage control. For Republicans, their goal is damage. Damaging Republicans is what "trusted, fact-based, independent journalists" do.
Scratch a journalist, and they’ll tell you it’s so politically clumsy (and Trumpy) for documents to be released on television in the White House briefing room by a Trump official. When the Democrats conspired to ruin Trump, they leaked it quietly to those "independent" journalists, who then didn’t want to mention they received dirt from PR firms like Fusion GPS, that were paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to distribute false information, like the junk contained in the "Steele dossier." The networks briefly touched on the Hillary connection when it came out, and quickly moved on, like that was a trifling matter. There’s no need to obsess over the nasty sausage they were making.
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Leftist journalists use anonymous sources to disguise the very partisan nature of the leakers, and there was a ton of surfing on anonymous sources in the tidal wave of anti-Trump journalism. The broadcast networks easily lapped up slime from "mainstream" sources like The New York Times or The Atlantic.
These broadcast "institutions" are not about to unravel a Russian-collusion narrative that they relentlessly promoted during Trump's first term. We counted 2,284 minutes of Russiagate coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts alone from 2017 to 2019. Even if then-FBI Director Robert Mueller never indicted Trump for collusion, it was a very persistent black cloud over everything Team Trump was trying to accomplish in his first term.
In the first months of 2017, it was the dominant Trump story. When Trump held a press conference that February and denounced the press, NBC’s Chuck Todd tweeted, "This not a laughing matter. I'm sorry, delegitimizing the press is un-American." He later added, "Press bashing may feel good to folks but when it's done by people in power, it's corrosive. Take off your partisan hats for a second."
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The networks don’t take off their partisan hats for a second. They pretend only their critics look like partisans.
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The networks didn’t want to focus on Trump’s accomplishments in his first term, and not just because successes in making conservative public policy aren’t "accomplishments" in their eyes. They wanted Trump to be best known for selling out America to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and laying out the scenario that the end of his presidency could occur at any moment.
Their wishful thinking is often defined as "news." It doesn’t sound like the "nightly news." Its sounds like a nightly narrative, carefully constructed for political effect. It was a major part of Trump’s evening news coverage being around 90% negative every month.
There’s any number of "gems" from the media’s anti-Trump collusion campaign. On ABC’s "The View" in 2017, co-host Sunny Hostin was mourning Hillary Clinton’s defeat: "What cost her the election, in my humble opinion is Russia’s hacking," and racism – she cited what CNN’s Van Jones called a "whitelash."
On ABC’s "This Week" in 2018, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg proclaimed, "We don’t know if Putin is his handler, his hero or his co-conspirator, but it’s obviously where his loyalty lies as opposed to lying with the American people."
Now, when Trump accuses Obama of treason in the Russia matter, "The View" co-host Joy Behar demanded to know: "Why can't Obama sue Trump for defamation of character?" But Behar and Hostin have repeatedly accused Trump of treason over the last five years. There it is again: when we call you treasonous, it’s not defamatory.