When the facts run counter to the media narrative on Russian collusion in 2016 election

Mollie Hemingway:

In investigating Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election, the media have found no story too small, no detail too minor to cover. Each leak that can be even remotely tied to the narrative of Russia harming America with the Trump campaign’s help is exploited and hyped for round-the-clock attention. To give just one example, CNN ran a report in May dramatically headlined “First on CNN: AG Sessions did not disclose Russia meetings in security clearance form, DOJ says.”

The story said Sessions failed to note at least two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on his security clearance form. CNN alleged the form requires him to list “any contact” he had with any foreign government or its representatives. “The new information from the Justice Department is the latest example of Sessions failing to disclose contacts he had with Russian officials,” the story alleged, driving the Russia-Trump collusion narrative.

Many other media outlets followed CNN’s lead, including the Washington Post, Politico, ABC News, and others.

Earlier this week, more than six months after the initial worrisome report ran, CNN ran a brief update noting that, well, it turns out Sessions never had to disclose those meetings as part of official government work, and was told that at the time he filed his clearance form. The weirdest part was that the Department of Justice told CNN that originally, but the breathless report was filed and hyped in any case.
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So how do the media handle dramatic updates that run counter to the narrative they’ve been pushing? This week, text messages sent by Peter Strzok, a chief investigator of both the Clinton email probe and the Russia collusion probe, were released to Congress. Some of them stood out:

In August 2016, Strzok, who played a lead-investigator role in the Hillary Clinton–emails investigation, flatly stated that the FBI could not ‘take that risk,’ referring to the possibility that Donald Trump might be elected president. He made the statement in a message to Lisa Page, a bureau lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Strzok referred to an alternative FBI ‘path’ regarding Trump’s ‘unlikely’ election that Page had proposed during a meeting they’d attended in ‘Andy’s office’ — meaning deputy director Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s number-two official, second only to then-director James Comey.

The texts, which displayed a high degree of animus toward Trump, also referred to an “insurance policy” of some kind to deal with the threat of his successful candidacy. The context of the texts remains to be learned, but there is no question that if such texts and conversations were discovered against the previous president, they would be front-page news for weeks on end.

It will surprise no one that these texts were not covered with the same obsession that leaks regarding Russia have been covered....
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She goes on to give eight examples of how the media tried to ignore the question about what Strzok meant by an insurance policy in case Trump was elected. 

I think it can be fairly argued that what he meant was using the dirty dossier to argue collusion as a way to stop Trump from taking office.  After Trump won there followed several leaks of classified material in an attempt to damage the President-elect. 

They did not stop after he was sworn in.  It looks like a plot to use opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democrats as an excuse to spy on their political opponent.  The handling of the dirty dossier by the FBI and the intelligence agencies suggests they were embracing teh Democrat plot.