David Harsanyi " ‘Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good,” legendary reporter Carl Bernstein recently claimed. Pretty good? If there’s a major news story over the past 70 years that the American media have botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I’d love to hear about it.
"Four big scoops recently run by major news organizations, written by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing, turned out to be completely wrong.
"Reuters, Bloomberg and others reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had subpoenaed President Trump’s records from Deutsche Bank. Trump’s attorney says it hadn’t.
"ABC reported that candidate Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn’t (as far as we know). The New York Times ran a story claiming that K.T. McFarland, a former member of the Trump transition team, had acknowledged collusion. She hadn’t.
"Then, CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails before they were published. It had not.
"Forget your routine bias. These were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits and analysts, all of whom are feeding frenzied expectations about Trump-Russia collusion that have now been internalized by many as indisputable truths. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year." . . .
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