The opening scene of the Big Reveal of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report went according to the script: Conservatives “pounced,” the left “pushed back” and the media turned to each other for comfort and reassurance.

Amid the misty-eyed cable news anchors and the hastily arranged panels of pundits carrying out a series of televised group therapy sessions, a theme began to take shape — a soothing, healing incantation of hope and deliverance: This can’t be the end. There’s got to be more.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow got the ball rolling with her stream-of-consciousness opening, rhetorically cursing the gods of sitting-president-indictment norms and promising (pleading for?) much more to come from the Southern District of New York and Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler.

CNN threw together a panel of its Russia collusion all-stars, all of whom, like Maddow, played principal roles in bringing the Russia collusion “slam dunk” into our living rooms and embedding the notion of a treasonous president into the national psyche.

They made no mention of the provenance of those great expectations as they were being dashed, ironically, in the same studios whence they arose, but chose instead to focus on the future.

Their message? “It was never really that important to prove that the leader of our country was a compromised asset of the Kremlin. That was just something we liked to talk about while we waited for the serious charges to be brought, like inflating his assets for insurance purposes.”

There will be no public mea culpa from the media for two years of feverishly biased hyping of unfounded allegations that President Trump is engaged in treason and actively operating as an agent of Russia. Nor will we hear any indications of regret from the current and former Democratic politicians and intelligence community officials who initiated, distributed and sustained those allegations.

They’ll blame Trump for his outbursts, failing to acknowledge that an innocent man knows on day one that no evidence will be uncovered. If that innocent man is president, the charge treason and the investigation about to enter its third year, one would expect him to have a fairly dynamic opinion as to the legitimacy of the investigation.

We will hear a lot about the accessibility of the information in the Mueller report. The idea is to demand a level of access and transparency that is impossible to attain, then to create a hypothetical scenario wherein any redaction or withholding of such material is an injustice worthy of protest and suspicion.

Presto: You’ve guaranteed a grievance you can unleash like a squirrel running across a highway when you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of having to respond to the factual reality of the Mueller conclusions.

We will hear of the vast array of additional investigations involving the president, information that will be presented to us as if these investigations were all predicated on substantive evidence of probable cause of a crime. Considering their role as emotional crutches for the same Democratic politicians and media who fell so deeply for the treason narrative, it’s a good bet that these investigations will proceed without the level of critical scrutiny one would expect a journalist to focus on something like, say, the Steele dossier. Mueller may have been the one they loved, but Nadler, Schiff and the SDNY will become the ones they’re with.

What we won’t hear is an apology, or an introspective review of the mistakes and professional lapses that brought us all to this point. There will be a reckoning, but that reckoning won’t be televised.

Instead, the reckoning will take place in the hearts and minds of the millions of Americans outside the Acela corridor who’ve been watching this slow-motion train wreck of a self-absorbed, hopelessly biased legacy media beclowning themselves in pursuit of the admiration and legitimacy of their peers, and of the Democratic politicians with whom they share secrets, lies and tactics in furtherance of their mutual ideological objectives.

The reckoning will come in the form of an enlightened audience and electorate, whose questions and doubts about the motives and agenda of the media have been fused by this experience over the last two years into a fundamental and abiding distrust of their political reporting, their use of anonymous sources and their empty promises of unbiased reporting.

The reckoning may not be televised, but it will be this: You will no longer be believed.

Jason Beale (a pseudonym) is a retired US Army interrogator and strategic debriefer. This column was adapted from The Federalist.