The mass delusion of the Russia collusion hoax

 Fox News:

The absurd 'Russiagate' Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post 

As a lesson in mass delusion, it’s worth going through the 20 stories that make up the Post and the Times’ award-winning series

"For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest," the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, "that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration."

Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — a 2018 National Reporting prize shared by The Washington Post and The New York Times for reporting on Russiagate — did no such thing.

WILL NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST RETURN PULITZER FOR MISLEADING RUSSIA COLLUSION STORIES?

It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy we now know never existed.

Oh, it was "deeply sourced," in that deep-state Democratic bureaucrats, furious that Trump had won the White House, were falling over themselves to talk anonymously to reporters.

And it was "relentlessly reported," or at least just relentless, as the newspapers were obsessed with taking down the Trump administration.

Yet reading these pieces four years later, one is struck not only by how irrelevant they are, but how shlocky — tinged with a McCarthyist alarmism of a red under every bed. Two major newspapers that hold themselves up as the pinnacle of press freedom, the "truth dies in darkness" brigade and all that, pushed a conspiracy theory.

As a lesson in mass delusion, it’s worth going through the 20 stories that make up the Post and the Times’ award-winning series to show just how damaging they were: to the truth, to the newspapers’ reputations — and to America itself.
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I think the media did this because they desperately wanted the lies to be true.  Their prejudice against Trump and his voters was visceral.  Even after it was demonstrated that their reporting was wrong many of them bitterly cling to those lies because they hate Trump and his policies which turned out to be remarkably successful.  They still hate Trump and still seek stories they hope will block him from running again because they think he could very well win again.