If you have nothing going on and 10 hours to spare, you should still find something to do other than read the tragically long article in the Columbia Journalism Review that bills itself as a reckoning for the appalling misconduct of the news media during the Trump years. It’s too little and about six years too late for that trash.
Mummified legend Bob Woodward is quoted in the piece, authored this week by former New York Times journalist Jeff Gerth, urging newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” Gerth himself says “news outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as forthright in examining their own Trump-Russia coverage.” He ticks through a series of prominent writers and editors who “declined to comment” on his exhausting attempt at serious — very, very serious — media accountability.
So what? They did what they did. They continue to do it. They have achieved their goals and shown they’re willing to defend their victories with whatever it takes. But we, the people who called B.S. from the beginning, are supposed to be impressed, grateful even, that someone of prestige is acknowledging that we were right?
Gerth, Woodward, and the rest can go practice having a stroke.
No amount of “painful road of introspection” can fix what the media, conspiring with the Democratic Party and the permanent Washington bureaucracy, did to this country and to American democracy. They beat a terrifying lie — a sitting president as an asset of a foreign adversary — into the public consciousness for
