While the 24 hour cable channels immediately started booking Trump defenders in response to the release of the redacted Robert Mueller report to ask them if the Democrats are 'overreaching" to maybe possibly kinda use the word "impeachment" (looking at you, Chuck Todd and Alex Witt), nary a single mainstream media outlet (print or television) mentioned that they, too, were very much not exonerated in their role in interfering in the 2016 election.
Catch that? GRU would use the Facebook messaging app to go directly to American reporters to feed them stories. DOJ kindly redacted which specific reporters were used as stenographers for Russian misinformation, but I think we can guess some of them.
As Thomas Jefferson once wrote:
"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Letter to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785.
If democracy is in as fragile place as the current debate over impeaching Trump is (if Trump's violations do not rise to the level of impeachment, dear God, what does?), the media must take responsibility for their role in causing that fragility and to take steps to do their jobs better.
