Establishment media on Tuesday panned Special Counsel John Durham’s court filings that alleged Hillary Clinton’s campaign associates spied on Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency.
After more than 48 hours since Durham’s court filing revelations were reported, the New York Times and Washington Post finally wrote articles on the subject, but they cast doubt on the filings’ significance. The outlets framed their articles around criticizing “right-leaning media” for “carefully” scrutinizing “off track” narratives that are “often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation.”
The Times headlined its Monday story, “Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track,” and claimed the “alarmist” narrative highlights “the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage”:
Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.
The Post published an “analysis” article Monday afternoon that claimed there is no evidence “Trump Tower was ‘wiretapped,'” and avoided making a clear connection between Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her associates that allegedly spied on Trump:
There are legitimate questions about the effort to link Trump back to Russia using this data that was not only sketchy at the outset, but had also been debunked by the time the election was over. But there is no question that this is not proof that Trump Tower was “wiretapped.”
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If it’s evidence of Trump being “spied on,” as the former president has also claimed in recent days, it’s a very broad sort of spying — collecting all of the domain-name lookups from a physical location or a network — being conducted not by the Obama administration or by Hillary Clinton, but by an anti-Trump lawyer.
The New York Times and Washington Post are among the first establishment media outlets to report on the allegations against Hillary’s campaign associates, though the reporting came at least three days after the news first broke. CNN reported the court filings Tuesday morning.
MSNBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS news channels have ignored the recent revelations, according to Fox News.
After Breitbart News reported CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News had not reported on the political scandal 48 hours after the news broke, NBC finally reported on the investigation Monday night. CBS News and ABC News still remained silent, however, perhaps allowing the Post and the Times to create the establishment media’s narrative.
On Tuesday, Hillary refused to answer questions about one of the largest political scandals while arriving at her daughter’s apartment in New York City, the Daily Mail reported.
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