Early this week the Wall Street Journal sent out a Politics and Policy email blast concerning an upcoming story:
WSJ News Exclusive
The Justice Department tapped a grand jury to re-investigate the 2016 Trump-Russia probe.
The development is the most serious escalation in recent weeks in Trump’s longtime effort to portray the 2016 investigation as a criminal plot by Democrats to undermine his presidency, though investigators, intelligence officials and lawmakers ultimately concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump over Hillary Clinton.
This story is about what is potentially the biggest political scandal in American history, yet this is how the Wall Street Journal chooses to characterize it in their daily email blast.
Oh, where to begin? Given the WSJ News Exclusive tag, this is billed as a hard news item and should not be ladled with enough opinion to choke a rhinoceros.
The development is the most serious escalation in recent weeks in Trump’s longtime effort to portray the 2016 investigation as a criminal plot by Democrats to undermine his presidency
As accurate as this may be technically, does it have any business appearing in a hard news item? It is without doubt the author’s opinion and is just one more example of the mainstream media’s effort to minimize the importance of this story. The authors may as well have said the development is the culmination of Trump’s Quixotical vendetta against his purported enemies.
Trump’s longtime effort to portray the 2016 investigation as a criminal plot by Democrats to undermine his presidency insinuates that it is Trump and Trump alone who sees the 2016 investigation, in some sort of paranoid rage, as a sinister plot against him. Many reporters outside the DNC media bubble have reported bravely and in-depth on this investigation and see itin much the same way as Trump, and have reported accurately and extensively on that basis. That is, as a potentially criminal conspiracy.
though investigators, intelligence officials and lawmakers ultimately concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Again, technically accurate, but the sin here is one of omission. That the investigators, intelligence officials and lawmakers came to this conclusion without knowledge of the evidence in the recently declassified documents that are the core of the new developments. Isn’t this kind of important?
The full article was paywalled, but I would expect this first paragraph conveys the tenor of the rest:
The Justice Department tapped a grand jury to reinvestigate the intelligence community’s assessment of Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring the lengths to which President Trump’s second-term administration is determined to go to avenge the central grievance of his first.
…underscoring the lengths to which President Trump’s second-term administration is determined to go to avenge the central grievance of his first.
Again, more opinion casting the story as nothing more than a Trump vendetta, as though he, and the American people who voted for him, have no legitimate grievance here.
This is a clinic on Media Bias 101, one that the Wall Street Journal should take much more shame than pride in. There is nothing in the email blast that an honest fact checker could come back with to assign Pinocchios to. But the language used, and the pertinent facts omitted, convey what I can only assume to be the authors’ desired narrative. That being that this new grand jury investigation is more about assuaging Trump’s ego than actually holding accountable, the very powerful officials at the highest levels of government, intelligence, and law enforcement, who at a minimum, executed the dirtiest political smear in American history and may well have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to do so.
Here is how I summarized Russiagate in these pages two years ago:
Fast-forward to 2016 and the election of Donald J. Trump. Trump was the most outside of outsiders. He wasn't only not a member of the D.C. club; he wasn't even allowed to swim in the pond. Trump threatened to upend most every aspect of the Uniparty's long-running rape and plunder of American taxpayers.
Enter "Russiagate," the absurd notion that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to secure the election… Hillary Clinton's campaign came up with the idea to smear Trump as a Russian asset (the Steele Dossier), to deflect attention from her own email scandal. John Brennan's CIA got wind of this plot and briefed both the Obama White House and FBI on the scheme.
The only thing that’s changed since then is the re-election of Trump and the release of these newly declassified documents that do far more to confirm than debunk this line of thinking. The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of themselves for attempting to minimize the importance of any story about what is potentially the biggest political scandal in American history, as well as for doing the dirty work of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who are both desperately clinging to the Pulitzer Prizes their shoddy and potentially conspiratorial “journalism” garnered them.
As George Carlin so accurately said so many years ago: “it’s a small club and you ain’t in it!”
Image: Wall Street Journal