WTF MSM!? is a newsletter that puts a dose of sunlight on the mainstream media and exposes how the media twist facts, selectively report, and outright lie to advance their left-wing agenda. You can sign up for the WTF MSM!? newsletter here.



On Sunday, "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace pushed former FBI Director James Comey into a corner and elicited an apology from him. Comey said he was "sorry" for his characterizations of how the FBI obtained FISA warrants on Trump associates. Now it's the media's turn: By and large, the media owes us an apology for its lies and mischaracterizations over the course of the Trump presidency.

The media obfuscation about alleged Trump misdeeds, and Obama administration efforts to thwart them, began in 2016. The media campaign against the president shifted into overdrive in March 2017, when CNN media critic/cheerleader Brian Stelter went on the offensive after LevinTV host Mark Levin pieced together that there was surveillance on the Trump campaign.

Stelter and his media cohorts have been unrelenting, even in the face of mounting evidence of how deep the misconduct of the FBI was. Last week, after the DOJ inspector general report was released, the media called it a victory for the FBI and its own reporting.

It wasn't. It was a devastating account of an agency in turmoil.

During all of this, there have been two left-leaning members of the media who have been horrified and appalled at what happened to the Trump campaign in 2016 and what has happened since: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept.

On Thursday, Greenwald published a blistering critique of the media, calling its coverage of the FBI's probe into Trump a "scandal of historic magnitude." Before turning to the media, Greenwald summed up exactly what happened.

If you don't consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that's what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

Greenwald then goes through how the media have not only been complicit with hiding the malfeasance, they've rewarded those who took part with paychecks. He closed:

None of these journalists have acknowledged an iota of error in the wake of this report because they know that lying is not just permitted but encouraged as long as it pleases and vindicates the political beliefs of their audiences. Until that stops, credibility and faith in journalism will never be restored, and – despite how toxic it is to have a media that has no claim on credibility – that despised status will be fully deserved.

The media has not just misreported what has happened in the so-called Russiagate conspiracy. It actively partook in the cover-up. It actively downplayed anyone who dared go off the approved script.

It was wrong.

The media owes you an apology. Just don't hold your breath. Because you'll never get one.

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