WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The backlash is building and may soon be unleashed.

Mainstream media have overplayed their hand with their unceasing and venomous attacks on Donald Trump. He, of course, has fueled the flames with his petulant taunts, but at the end of the day, it is the media that have squandered their credibility.

Their obsession with possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, even in the absence of hard evidence, has not only blocked Trump’s agenda, but has kept Democrats and other opponents from offering anything like a constructive alternative.

Breaking news consists of vague reports of administration officials or Trump aides meeting with Russians — meetings that seem shadowy mostly because there are no details and the sources are anonymous.

This led inevitably to the debacle at CNN, which this week had to retract a story that linked one-time Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund. The cable news channel forced three prominent journalists — including Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Lichtblau, who had just joined CNN from the New York Times — to resign.

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But Glenn Greenwald, who helped the Guardian win a Pulitzer for reporting the Edward Snowden leaks, notes that other mainstream outlets have also published near-hysterical stories full of factual inaccuracies and thinly sourced.

“CNN is hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia,” Greenwald wrote this week in The Intercept. “In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.”

Needless to say, though Greenwald underlines the point, these reports about “the Russia Threat” invariably exaggerated the threat or invented incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle.

These, yes, fake news stories are “too numerous to count,” says Greenwald, who cites instances from mostly progressive media like the Washington Post, MSNBC, Slate, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post again, and again.

The reporters behind these stories apparently think of themselves as the new generation of journalism heroes, mirroring the exploits of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in exposing the Watergate scandal and bringing down President Richard Nixon.

But even Woodward finds the media pursuit of Trump excessive. It “really betrays the anti-Trump media bias,” Woodward reportedly said this week, referring to the “Russiagate” stories. He called for more “fair-mindedness” in media reporting.

Amid reports that CNN has been pursuing the Russia story to pump up ratings, it’s becoming obvious even as media search for a new business model that the old advertising-based business model, which depends on ratings or circulation, doesn’t guarantee fair or balanced reporting, either.

In the pre-digital world, at least a sense of ethics and competition for credibility with readers kept reporters and editors honest. With all the new competition from online media, that discipline seems to have crumbled in the traditional media.

“In the sixth month of Donald Trump’s presidency, we are witnessing an unprecedented meltdown of much of the media,” the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin wrote this week. “Standards have been tossed overboard in a frenzy to bring down the president. What started as bias against him has become a cancer that is consuming the best and brightest.”

Academic gadfly Camille Paglia, who bills herself as a Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and Jill Stein in the general election last year, also took the media to task in an impassioned critique.

“I think it’s absolutely grotesque the way my party has destroyed journalism,” she said on Sean Hannity’s radio show, referring to the Democrats. “Right now, it is going to take decades to recover from this atrocity that’s going on where the news media have turned themselves over to the most childish fraternity, kind of buffoonish behavior.”

When Hannity asked her about “violent rhetoric” in the media regarding Trump, Paglia snapped: “There’s no journalism left. What’s happened to The New York Times? What’s happened to the major networks? It’s an outrage.”

Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, whose new book is called “The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote,” says this overreach is costing media its credibility.

“We want to critically and carefully cover our institutions and powerful politicians, absolutely,” Attkisson said on Fox News. “But when you do it in such a way that the public no longer believes what they’re getting is the whole truth or sometimes the truth at all, you’ve undercut yourself because we’ll get into an area where people hardly believe anything they hear at first blush.”

Conversely, of course, there are those who see the administration’s attacks on the press as a threat to our democracy.

“If there were ever a doubt that a traitor now occupies the Oval Office,” columnist Adele Stan wrote in The American Prospect this week, “Tuesday’s assault on the exercise of a free press, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, should dispel it.”

The “assault” was in the form of White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders chastising reporters for their fixation on the “Trump-Russia hoax.”

“I think that we have gone to a place where if the media can’t be trusted to report the news,” Sanders said at the White House press briefing, “then that’s a dangerous place for America.”

It was that remark that prompted the now-famous counter-charge from reporter Brian Karem, who covers the White House for Playboy, that she was “inflaming” the reporters in the room.

The problem is that if the press corps limits its investigations to badgering administration spokesmen or floating half-baked stories based on a single anonymous source — which is the opposite of what Woodward and Bernstein did — then the backlash against the mainstream media will continue to build.

In the absence of any real evidence of Russian “collusion,” it could then erupt in a full-fledged rejection of traditional media.