Now that the Mueller report has been released, showing, to the great surprise of absolutely no one, that the entire premise of the collusion allegation was a hoax from start to finish, our intrepid firefighters of the Fourth Estate are now engaged in an exercise of self justification.

The replies to this are quite instructive about the extent to which there are diverging universes in which people live.

— Philip Bump (@pbump) April 18, 2019

And by "mainstream media," I'm talking about reporting by journalists, not cable chatter by pundits. It held up very well, as the many lies of Trump and White House officials were exposed under oath.

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) April 19, 2019

According to Mueller, the press reports were accurate. The false news came from Trump and his aides. Something I wrote: https://t.co/4Elk1ryvyY

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) April 19, 2019

Explanation (because some of you clearly need one): of the evidence presented in the Mueller report, there is a ton we already knew from the REPORTING on the investigation. I say REPORTING—rather than hot take analysis on TV, Twitter, and elsewhere—deliberately.

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) April 18, 2019

This report has "really corroborated a lot of the good journalism that was done," @ShimonPro points out pic.twitter.com/KT6HlaxfDw

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 18, 2019

After all the Media Reckoning talk after the Barr summary, the Mueller report corroborates a lot of reporting from big news outlets.

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 18, 2019

This is only true if you call reporting the facts of a story sorta correct but in completely wrong context. Every major piece of media reporting on the collusion hoax had two things in common. First, it took the Steele (or Trump) dossier to be mostly corroborated. Second, the underlying premise was an uncritical and credulous belief that the Trump campaign had cooperated with the Russian government. Here are just a few of the stories they got wrong.

Cohen — Prague
Manafort — Kilimnik
Page — Rosneft bribe
Don Jr — Wikileaks preview
Cohen — Trump perjury
Flynn — Russian honeypot
Trump — Collusion
Media — Exoneration https://t.co/iQd5ecv98V

— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) April 19, 2019

In terms of bloopers, who can forget that ABC’s Brian Ross ran a “scoop” about Flynn “flipping” on Trump that caused the Dow to drop 300 points. (See GOOD: ABC Suspends Brian Ross Over His Fake News Report On The Mike Flynn Indictment.) Or, remember when CNN’s Manu Raju was taking dictation from Adam Schiff and reported that Donald Trump, Jr., had notice of the Wikileaks dump of Clinton documents before they were public? (See HAHAHA! CNN Gets Burned On Fake Story About Donald Trump Jr. And Wikileaks Email–UPDATED.) How about those Paul Manafort notes from the Trump Tower meeting that mentioned getting campaign contributions from the Russians? (See Source For An NBCNews #Fakenews Story Is Outed And It Is Not A Big Surprise. Or the story that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress? That story was debunked by Mueller himself.

Over the last two years, every Trump-Russia "bombshell" dropped by the media was wrong. We now know that Mueller found no evidence of collusion, but the media found evidence a number of times… and then had to retract it. Here's a look back (thread):

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) April 18, 2019

This headline doesn't even mention that Trump was cleared of any Russian collusion – which was the whole point of the Mueller investigation.
The US media's bias laid bare. https://t.co/pngDgQLvwA

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) April 19, 2019

At no point to do you find in the mainstream media anyone asking questions about Christopher Steele or the dossier or Fusion GPS or Brennan or anything that does not follow the narrative that Trump only won because he had help from the Russians. If fact, the only real coverage of the entire affair came from sources like Byron York at the Washington Examiner, from The Daily Caller, and from pundits on the right…some of which are on this site.

“For many of the country’s most prestigious news organizations, the question becomes whether they have sewn themselves into a moral straitjacket and now must abdicate coverage of the biggest story of the next two years to upstart rivals on the right.” https://t.co/VQqMCZpcuR

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) April 18, 2019

What you’ve seen for the past two years isn’t reporting. It isn’t journalism. It is partisan political propaganda.

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