Since learning last week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of direct collusion between the Donald Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials looking to alter the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections, some left-leaning media and progressive activists have been on a soul-searching mission. How did they miss that the allegation was so thinly substantiated?

Vox Media feels it may have the answer. In an interview over the weekend with Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, who claims that the Russian collusion spectacle was the worst media mistake in history, both Vox reporter Sean Illing and Taibbi agree: the Left was just far too devastated in the weeks following Trump’s election to think straight.

“A lot of people simply did not want to believe that Trump was a legitimate president, that someone this vulgar and this dishonest could win a presidential election,” Illing says. “And I think that disbelief and the emotional devastation of his election colored a lot of our judgments.”

“Absolutely. Look, almost every pundit failed to see what was happening during the presidential election. No one thought this guy would win. It was almost a 100 percent consensus in the industry. Nobody even accepted it as an idea that he could possibly win, and a lot of that had to do with the insularity of the media,” Taibbi agreed. – read more