I took a few days to go wander around Paris.
In the meantime (as Nicole and I discussed on Friday), the WaPo has subjugated itself to Donald Trump by spiking an endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Whatever else WaPo and LAT’s capitulation to Trump has done, it has focused attention on media failures this year.
I concluded back in February that the media was not going to help hold Trump accountable this year. I concluded that when zero traditional outlets pursued the story of how Donald Trump’s DOJ used a side channel to ingest dirt Rudy Giuliani collected from — among others — known Russian spies to criminally frame Joe Biden, with the Alexander Smirnov bribery allegation.
One candidate’s DOJ criminally framed the other candidate and it has been simply ignored.
That’s not the only way the media has failed. Hell, there have been maybe two stories about Trump’s abuse of pardons. There has been no scrutiny about whether Trump works for the Saudis, rather than the American people. We don’t talk about the fact that Trump stole 100 classified documents, and probably more we haven’t located.
This failure is not surprising. After all, the first act via which Trump cowed the media came with his success at spinning the results of the Russian investigation.
The Mueller investigation and its aftermath obtained legal judgments that Trump’s Coffee Boy, his National Security Adviser, his campaign manager, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover-up what happened with Russia in 2016. That’s an astoundingly productive investigation, one that should keep the issue of what really did happen at the forefront (particularly after Treasury confirmed that Russian spooks did get the internal campaign information Paul Manafort shared). And yet the media has never taken the time to fact check Trump’s Russia Russia Russia chant, via which he dismisses the result of the Russian investigation as a witch hunt. The media never calls him on that lie.
For whatever reason — perhaps ignorance, perhaps exhaustion — the media has allowed Trump to dodge accountability for the help Russia gave him in 2016. They have allowed him to apply a double standard on the Iran and Chinese hacks this year, when Trump invited foreign hacks in 2016. They simply ignored how in advance of 2020, Rudy Giuliani flew around the world soliciting help from — again, this is uncontroversial — at least one known Russian spy, right out in the open.
This is one thing I’ve tried to accomplish with the Ball of Thread series. Here’s how it worked.
- Trump and the media let the Steele dossier serve as a substitute for the actual things Trump did, both before and after the election.
- Trump turned an investigation into people grifting off their access to him into an attack on him by the Deep State.
- Republicans in Congress picked up and expanded the Steele dossier substitution.
- Along the way, these efforts did real, undoubtedly intentional damage to the FBI, especially those with expertise on Russia.
- Bill Barr thwarted what was intended as an impeachment referral.
- In his effort to kill Zombie Mueller, Barr created propaganda about the investigation and Joe Biden and laid the groundwork for January 6.
- The Durham investigation criminalized Hillary’s victimization by Russia.
- Bill Barr helped Rudy criminally frame Joe Biden.
- The Hunter Biden investigation(s) sucked up all the oxygen that should have been focused on Trump.
This is the process by which Trump has stoked grievance out of a Russian investigation that concluded that five top aides lied to hide what really happened.
And the media, to this day, lets him dismiss all that by chanting only Russia Russia Russia.
The media’s surrender, led by Jeff Bezos, to Trump’s authoritarianism is not new. The media has been doing this for six years.