Krystal Ball, a former MSNBC host, has admitted that her colleagues went too far focusing on Russiagate narrative alone that it turned into conspiracy theorizing.

After three years of non-stop speculations about an alleged collusion between the Kremlin and US President Donald Trump ended up with Russiagaters’ hopes crashed by the Mueller report, some in the American media seemed to have woken up to realize that the conspiratorial hype machine had replaced what should have been journalism.

The most recent example is Ball, who criticized her “former colleagues, friends” for going “so far into the realm of conspiracy theorizing” and adding too much value to the Russiagate speculations.

“This is ridiculous, okay. This is way out from what journalistic facts said, and it’s to the exclusion of other stories that people actually care about,” she told HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night.

However, it was not so much journalistic integrity of the broadcaster that hosted ‘Russigate queen’ Rachel Maddow that Ball was apparently concerned about. Instead, she said that too much focus on the Russiagate narrative, which eventually went up in smoke, hurt other “progressive causes.”

“Overall, I think MSNBC in the Trump era had done real damage to the left,” she said. “I mean look, the Russia story and what happened there was important. But it was not all-important.”

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Ball is anyway not the first to see some flaws in MSNBC’s line of reporting. The broadcaster’s another host, Lawrence O’Donnell, apologized in late August for his bombshell claim that President Donald Trump took out bank loans with the help of “Russian billionaires,” which he said “didn’t go through our rigorous verification and standards process.”

Yet, other US media have seemingly not lost their appetite for headline-grabbing stories about Russia. Most recently, CNN came up with a report about a high-level CIA spy within the Russian government, who had to be extracted allegedly out of fear he could be exposed by none other than Trump himself.

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