The leftist who rejects the false narrative of the left on 'Russian collusion' story

Lee Smith:

There’s only one American journalist who truly merits a Pulitzer Prize this year: Glenn Greenwald. He’s been on the biggest story of the year from day one. No, I don’t mean Russiagate, the main stage for the media’s preening self-advertisements of its heroic “resistance,” like “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In fact, the narrative holding that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is the chief piece of evidence that Greenwald has used to nail the year’s real top story—how the American press became a woozy facsimile of Pravda.

Last week, Greenwald called out the press for its latest blunder: “Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time,” wroteGreenwald. “The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.”

The question of why everyone got the same big scoop on the same day—only to find that the story was totally wrong—is a thread that leads to some very interesting places. So let’s follow it.

CNN claimed that an email sent to Donald Trump and his campaign officials that linked to WikiLeaks documents was dated Sept. 4, 2016—therefore showing that WikiLeaks, and by implication the Kremlin, had offered the Trump campaign an exclusive preview of damaging Democratic National Committee emails. But in fact, the email was dated Sept. 14—10 days later—and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier, meaning the big scoop proving Trump’s Russia ties was, in fact, a story about spam.

“Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy,” Greenwald continued, “which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like—would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news.”
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How many times has the media since promised the smoking gun that will finally and incontrovertibly prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to swing the Presidency away from Hillary Clinton? Boom! And then nothing. Poof.

When you repeatedly publish “news” that isn’t true, you’re no longer in the news business. Call it what you like—infotainment, media theater, crowd-sourced onanism, a human be-in—but it’s not “news,” because it isn’t true.

Just last week the press screwed up two other Russiagate stories, in addition to the CNN blunder. On Dec. 1, ABC News reported that Michael Flynn was going to testify that presidential candidate Donald Trump directed him to contact Russian officials. No—Trump was president-elect when he told his national security adviser to speak with foreign counterparts. Dec. 5, Reuters and Bloomberg reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for information on accounts relating to President Trump and his family members. No—the subpoenas dealt with “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.” And to round it off, CNN dropped its stink-bomb Dec. 8. Anyone who relied on this kind of information to fix the electrical wiring in your home, say, or tell you whether your food contained dangerous toxins would be a natural magnet for a major lawsuit.
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There is much more.

I think the media's problem is that they so desperately want these false stories to be true and therefore do not use the rigor one would normally use in checking out a story.   They are so consumed with Trump hatred that they can't distinguish fact from fiction.  It a story fits their narrative they go with it.