TRANSCRIPTS TWO YEARS OLD show various Obama officials denying under oath that they possessed evidence of Trump-Russia collusion while they implied the opposite on TV.
Even the outside firm that the FBI relied on for its claim that Democratic emails were hacked by the Russians admitted under oath . . .
. . . to finding no evidence that emails had been actually removed from Democratic servers.
Newsies in the aftermath of the Russia hoax now insist they were merely reporting on official actions. They carefully avert their eyes from the fact that the leaks they received and possibly even the official acts they reported were manufactured deliberately to put lies into the news.
If they had any grit, many of our senior reporters would be hopping mad now to learn they had been manipulated into reporting untruths to the public.
Instead many of them seem to be hanging around the same leakers and whisperers, hoping for new talking points to get themselves off the hook in the air-clearing now coming. It’s all part of what Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Aaron Maté of the Nation (two left-wing critics of the Russia hoax) call the “privilege protection racket.”
When all is said and done, half the story of our age will be how Democrats and the press became more Trumplike than Trump in their opposition to Trump.
Fools become liars when they knowingly persist in their misrepresentations to preserve personal dignity and professional standing.
By rights, the rectification should begin with the dismissal, on competence grounds, of the leadership in many newsrooms. It won’t. But at least register in your own mind how routinely and sometimes completely press behavior is at odds with values the press claims to represent.
(Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., "Media Cowardice and the Collusion Hoax," The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2020 (emphasis added, abridged))
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