Rex Murphy: Anti-Trump press has less credibility than Jussie Smollett right now
In their coverage of the so-called Russian collusion case, they abandoned principle, journalistic ethics, and in some cases, rationality
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Remember Michael Avenatti? He’s the lawyer (I’m not being kind — I may need “weasel” further down the column) who unleashed the outrageous allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Donald Trump nominee for the Supreme Court, claiming Kavanaugh organized and participated in “gang rapes” of Avenatti’s client, Julie Swetnick. The charges were as preposterous as they were savage.
Of course the whole buzzing hive of the dementedly anti-Trump press not only received those charges, and gave them air and headline, but because the allegations gave fresh oxygen to their calumnies against Trump, they — the stalwart guardians of the First Amendment, the press — upgraded Avenatti in a flash to Truth-teller, warrior-priest against the dark lord of the Trump Tower.
Kavanaugh’s spotless reputation — to hell with that. The mortification of his wife and children — who cares? The truth? Hey, we might bring down Trump, what’s truth if it impedes the takedown?
The allegations gave fresh oxygen to their calumnies against Trump
The “bloated Dunciad” of the mass media (I owe the phrase to my comrade columnist Conrad Black, a lighthouse in a tempest) bestowed on Avenatti the prestige of their attention. In numberless interviews they tried to pawn off this conniving wretch as a realistic presidential candidate for 2020. Avenatti ran a presidential exploratory campaign! “Oh, Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.”
Well, despite the swells and heavy waves from Justin Trudeau’s ever-expanding SNC-Lavalin woes, the news floated north last week that Avenatti had been arrested, in two separate cases, for allegedly trying to extort more than $25 million from Nike Inc., embezzling money from a client and defrauding a bank.
Even his more infamous client, the carnal exhibitionist with the cartoon name, Stormy Daniels, was heard keening a lament of crusader Avenatti’s lies, libels and license.
CNN, which some grey hairs may remember as a news network, gave this craven mountebank 65 full appearances to peddle his slanders and burnish his “credentials” — when even a single appearance would have been a journalistic depravity beyond the repair of contrition and penance.
I float all this as preface and prelude, merely to indicate by one specific egregious illustration the far vaster dereliction of huge swathes of the fourth estate over the past two to three years. In their relentlessly ill-headed, turbulently biased, and in some cases straightforward malevolent coverage of Donald Trump in the so-called Russian collusion case, they abandoned principle, journalistic ethics, and in some cases, rationality.
Donald Trump did not collude, conspire or co-ordinate with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election. Full stop. Nor did his campaign or anyone associated with him or the campaign. Full stop.
The major press were wrong on the biggest scandal story since Watergate, a story that so many of them prophesied would knock Trump out of office and see him and members of his family sent to jail. They characterized him as a “traitor,” a “Russian plant,” a “puppet of Putin,” the Manchurian Candidate in real life.
They tormented the functioning of American democracy with a fantasy conspiracy, and many of them worked with the frenzy of fanatics to convince their readers and viewers that their partisan-fired delusion was the truth. The mad Scheherazade of MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, trod paths of polemical projection against Trump that made Keith Olbermann — Maddow’s John the Baptist in the MSNBC fever-shop — resemble a normal human being. A similitude otherwise unavailable to him.
The great Russia collusion story that mesmerized the American press for more than two years, blistered the conduct of foreign relations, and ruined reputations (and inflated the salaries of its projectors) was one big, empty, useless, false bust.
The great Russia collusion story … was one big, empty, useless, false bust
The press Trump-despisers were wrong. And they were themselves contributors to the creation of an atmosphere in which a hollow story — founded as all now know on a Hillary Clinton-funded opposition dossier flooded with fiction and lurid fantasy and aided by anti-Trump, pro-Hillary functionaries in the CIA and DOJ — derailed public affairs in the U.S.
This is the second time the press has gone mad, and displayed reckless incompetence. They got the American election wrong, too.
A great majority of the professional press were so enthralled by (possibly clinical) hatred and contempt for Trump that they misread the American election itself. As I noted in a previous column, the sweep of the American press consensus that “Trump didn’t have a chance” and “Hillary was inevitable” was almost universal. Thirty minutes before the polls closed, The New York Times put Hillary’s odds of being president by night’s end at 92 per cent!
So, Trump has won twice. The press have failed twice
So, Trump has won twice. The press have failed twice. And, irony of ironies, what Mueller’s long longed-for, wildly anticipated report, actually established was an opposite bond of collusion: not Trump with Russia, but much of the American press colluding with last-ditch Hillary-ites, anti-Trump fanatics and fundamentalist Never Trumpers to find some means, tacky or cruel, to lie him out of office.
Hating Trump is a pathetic state of mind far more than the self-flattering notion that it is evidence of civic virtue. It should be an axiom: disgust at or for Donald Trump does not excuse, and should not motivate, deliberately sloppy partisan journalism.
Jussie Smollett now has more credibility than most anti-Trump pundits.
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