Taibbi was the first of these journalists I subscribed to on Substack, and I am glad I did.

Taibbi’s latest piece is a humdinger. He says what should be obvious, but no member of the media or the Left will say out loud: that the Russiagate story was a total fake. More importantly, he argues that until the MSM lays it all out there and admits their mistakes, lies, collaboration with the Democrats and the intelligence community in what amounts to a conspiracy to take down Donald Trump, they will never be worthy of trust.

Remember this one? Russian bots and trolls were blamed by virtually every major news organization in the country for amplifying the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. The files contain a mass of emails from executives blowing up this ridiculous story, once and for all.

The #ReleaseTheMemo scandal was one of the more shameful episodes in the recent history of our media, but taken seriously by all but one or two mainstream editors at the time. All citing the same dubious source — the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” trumpeted by former FBI counterintelligence official and current MSNBC contributor Clint Watts — they insisted Russians deployed Twitter bot-armies to whip up cyber-support for Republican congressmann Devin Nunes. Nunes had just released a classified memo alleging Democrats and the FBI used the infamous paid oppositional research dossier of ex-spy Christopher Steele to obtain secret FISA surveillance authority on Trump-connected figures like Carter Page, amid other improprieties.

We now know Twitter internally found no evidence, as in zero, that Russians were anywhere near this story.

“I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo,” wrote a piqued Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, in all other respects as loyal a Democratic partisan as can be imagined. “None of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

“These hashtags are organic,” said a second.

“Not seeing it,” said a third.

The contents of this particular scandal aren’t really important. What is important is the fact that the entire MSM took up these false claims from a fake organization, promoted by intelligence analysts and an MSNBC spook to assert something that was completely false. And all they had to do to verify it was ask the people at Twitter.

Twitter knew the story was false. They even told both congressmen and the media folks that it was false. And the MSM ran with the story because it fit in with the who Russia Russia Russia narrative.

This is a constant theme in the files. In addition to revelations about FBI censorship, shadow-banning, Pentagon use of fake accounts, and suppression of true information about issues like Covid-19, the Twitter emails regularly expose the wide delta between what we were told about foreign threats, and what a major platform seeing the raw data knew. (In this case, for instance, the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag reportedly originated with @TracyBeanz, the clearly American editor of UncoverDC). Even within the heavily partisan culture at Twitter, the regular “Russia, Russia, Russia” claims by politicians and media in self-serving pursuit of headlines caused eyes to roll.

“Members,” said one Twitter executive, “look foolish if they cry ‘Russia’ every time something happens on social media.”

In reading the Twitter Files it has occurred to me that the real scandal is not so much Twitter’s ideological bias. That was bad, and what they did was bad. But what was so much worse was the constant disinformation that came from the government and the media, who pushed Twitter to shape a narrative that everybody knew was false.

So false that often the people at Twitter, at least early on, were loathe to support. Even the Leftists at Twitter were often appalled at what was being done. They had the data–they knew that the claims about Russian interference were false, and warned others.

But of course the people they were warning also knew it was false, because they invented the lie. It was a disinformation op. Psychological warfare. And it included the media, passively and actively. Does anyone believe that the Washington Post and New York Times, who won Pulitzer Prizes pushing the false Russiagate story, didn’t know it was false?

It beggars belief.

We have a lot of problems in this country, and there are serious arguments to be had between blue and red about all sorts of issues, from immigration to the wealth gap to abortion and race. But the country is currently paralyzed by distrust of media that runs so deep that it prevents real dialogue, and that situation can’t be resolved until the corporate press swallows its pride and admits the clock has finally run out on its seven years of loony Russia conspiracies.

It’s over, you nitwits. It’s time to stow the Mueller votive candles, cop to the coverage pileup created by years of errors, and start the reconciliation process.

You’ll be tempted to shout, “But Trump, Stop the Steal, QAnon — Derp!” Don’t do it. Don’t be the Japanese soldier still clutching a bayonet to defend the forgotten atoll in 1960. Forget Trump: you need to clean your own house first. Expunging the years of absurd deceptions has to happen, if media companies ever want wide audiences to trust them again, and that starts with admitting the obvious screwups — like this case.

They weren’t screwups, though. In this I dissent from Taibbi. They wanted to get Trump. It was their obsession. And it was necessary for their power.

And it paid well. Ratings and sales went through the roof. So they lied.

The #ReleaseTheMemo tale took place at the peak of McCarthyite mania about omnipresent Russian saboteurs infecting domestic discourse. They were blamed not just for whipping up support for Nunes, but for hashtags like #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting, even #GunControlNow. They did all this to “widen the divide” between Americans, according to a not-at-all-kidding New York Times, whose sources then included the disgraced think tank New Knowledge (later outed in the New York Times itself for creating a fake Russian influence campaign, in an Alabama Senate race) and the aforementioned Hamilton 68, which “worked with” New Knowledge.

Twitter knew the story to be utterly false, and that the information the New York Times was relying on was simply fake. Yet the Times was indifferent to the facts, as were politicians who pushed the story out. It fit with the “Russia” narrative they relied on to “get” Trump and discredit Republicans.

In the case of both #SchumerShutdown and especially #ReleaseTheMemo, it’s undeniable thanks to #TwitterFiles emails that Twitter’s executives were aghast at the “Russian bots” story, and struggled to convince both media and members of Congress not to repeat assertions of Russian influence in public.

Yet three influential Democrats, including Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal and the House’s tireless, still-yapping Russiagate mascot, Adam Schiff, were determined to go there. Twitter execs scrambled anyway to try to stop each. After a lot of pleading, one staffer for “DiFI” — Feinstein — finally agreed it would be “helpful to know” how their main source Hamilton 68, created under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), came to “decide an account is a Russian influencer.”

It apparently didn’t occur to the DiFi staffer, or to Senator Feinstein herself, to ask this crucial question of how Watts and Hamilton 68 were identifying Russians before the Senator published an open letter with Schiff citing it as proof of Russian perfidy. Absolutely blind, in other words, they declared #ReleaseTheMemo to be Russian propaganda, saying it benefited from the “assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.”

Twitter executives TOLD them all that the story was false. Twitter had the data. They knew. They shared the data. The media and the Democrats simply ignored them because they were the ones who invented the lie in the first place. Feinstein, perhaps wasn’t a mastermind in the fraud, but Schiff and company? Lies all the way down, with the MSM amplifying a story that they knew to be false. Because Twitter told them so.

Hamilton 68’s front page still features a drawing of Vladimir Putin tossing bouquets of evil red Twitter birds into the atmosphere. Its lead paragraph also still features a quote from former Director of National Intelligence (now CNN contributor ) James Clapper, most famous for lying to Congress about the NSA surveillance program subsequently exposed by Ed Snowden. On the Hamilton 68 page, which purports to provide a “real-time look at Russian propaganda,” Clapper warned that having interfered in 2016, Russians were now beginning to “prep the battlefield” for 2018.

Twitter Global Communications chief Emily Horne described Hamilton’s analytical method as one might an icky thing held by tweezers at arm’s length. “Hamilton 68 does not release the accounts that make up their dashboard,” she wrote, “so no one can verify the accounts they include are in fact Russian automated accounts.”

That this preposterous parody of a web analytic tool was taken seriously by reporters for years is embarrassing enough. That U.S. Senators relied upon it as a sole source in the #ReleaseTheMemo episode shows how desperate they were to change the subject, to deflect from a Nunes memo later proved correct by an Inspector General’s report.

Remember how the media slandered Nunes as a lying conspiracy theorist and shill for Trump? He was right. The media also knew he was right, because many of the sources Nunes used were also available to people in the media. They simply wanted to bury the story because it contradicted their Narrative.

Blumenthal in some ways was more craven than Feinstein or even Schiff. His people approached Twitter after Feinstein published her letter, because Blumenthal “wanted to send a followup letter.” Twitter executives foolishly believed this meant there was a window to talk the Senator out of doing so.

One suggested “it might be worth nudging Blumenthal’s staffer” to the effect that “it could be in his boss’ best interest not to go out there, because it could come back to make him look silly.” Another tried to “wave him off” because “we don’t think these are bots.” In one instance a Twitter comms official proposed bargaining with Blumenthal, essentially asking him to hold his fire on #ReleaseTheMemo in exchange for an unnamed future concession. “It seems like there are other wins we can offer him,” she wrote.

Blumenthal and his staffers instead blew them all off, and went ahead to publish their own own open letter later, warning that “nefarious” Russians out to “discredit” the probe of Special Counsel Robert Mueller were certainly using the deplorable #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.

“We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated Russian citizens,” Blumenthal wrote. …

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that if Twitter wasn’t actually seeing Russian bots driving #ReleaseTheMemo, that the countless news stories that argued as much citing a single flawed source, Hamilton 68, were wrong.

That’s a lot of news stories, starting with entries by NBC, ABC, Associated Press, PBS, Washington Post, New York Times, Slate, Voice of America, RFE/RL, CBC, Salon, MSNBC, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, and countless others, and that’s not counting broadcast, radio, podcasts, etc.

Why the focus on the Nunes memo? Because Nunes blew the lid off both the Steele Dossier scam and revealed that the FBI had been lying to everybody, including the FISA court, in order to spy on Trump and his aides. What should have been one of the biggest government corruption scandals in American history–far worse than Watergate and the coverup of a stupid burglary–was swept under the rug by slandering Nunes and basically calling him a Russian asset.

In this case, we’re adding a whole new peak of wrong stories to another range of known wrong stories: the multitudinous articles that came out around the same time declaring, with absolute certainty, that the Nunes memo about FISA abuse and the misuse of the Steele dossier (among other things) was not just wrong, but possible grounds to have Nunes removed from office.

These included pieces like “Nunes Memo is Slide Toward Abuse of Power,” “Highly Debated Nunes Memo on Alleged FISA Abuses Furthers Conspiracy Theories,” “The Nunes Memo Proves One Thing, and It’s the Opposite of What It Wants to Prove,” “Nunes Memo Reveals Congressman’s Penchant for Conspiracy Theories,” “Nail in the Coffin for the Nunes Memo,” etc., etc., etc.

A typical editorial take on the Nunes memo back then sounded like Eugene Robinson’s, at the Washington Post:

It’s simply not possible, on any level, to take seriously the histrionics from Trump and his true-believer allies over the Nunes memo — except as evidence of how far the GOP has plunged into cynicism and madness.

Again, the “madness” of the Nunes memo was verified as true just under two years later, with the release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report. Without getting into the weeds of those stories, Horowitz, no Republican partisan, found the same things Nunes did: that the Steele dossier played a “central and essential role” in the FBI’s effort to secure FISA surveillance authority of Trump-linked figures, that those warrant applications were riddled with errors and lies, and the Steele reporting itself was at best highly suspect.

Every single person involved in the Russia Russia Russia lies has profited from them, as they knew they would. And they were able to do because they colluded with each other to promote stories and a Narrative that they knew, beyond doubt, to be flawed. They self-consciously lied. They weren’t mistaken, or misled, or anything “innocent” like that.

They lied. Because they were told repeatedly and convincingly that what they were saying was false. That wasn’t news to any of them. They concocted the falsehood in the first place. That is the reason they kept on pushing it. Given the resources the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and every MSM outlet put into the story, it was literally impossible for them to not know it was false. They knew the leakers, their motives, who was saying what and why–far more than the public could because they were the ones getting the leaks. They knew.

It was not Russian collusion. It was collusion among the Elite. They chose a Narrative, created it, promulgated it, slandered and undermined everybody who tried to poke holes in it. And they walk away with more money, power, and prizes. They are proud of it.

This won’t do. The catastrophe has to be met head-on, and admitted at scale, in order for any of these actors to be redeemed. They won’t listen to me, of course, since I was pegged “right wing” years ago for dissenting on this matter. As the New York Times put it, my “fan base” shifted because I was “skeptical of claims of collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump’s campaign.” Never mind that I was right to be skeptical, and that this is the approach any ethical journalist would have taken: their position is that because such skepticism pleased the wrong people, it’s evidence of shifting political beliefs.

If they want to keep that up in my case, fine. But if they want to regain anything like the broad authority they once had with audiences everywhere, they need to face this thing. It may take a bigger evidentiary shock than even the Twitter Files can provide to these recalcitrant editors, but who’s to say such a thing isn’t coming?

Here Taibbi is just wishcasting, I am afraid. The truth is that all the media outlets have come out of this feeling pretty good, with CNN being the major exception. The WaPo, perhaps, has been hurt and has been bleeding readers, but that I would suspect is mainly because there is a paucity of Trump stories to feed their rabid base.

But it was long ago that anybody in the MSM, or perhaps in most of the media ecosystem, could make money by appealing to a broad spectrum of Americans. The cash comes from choosing a demographic and appealing to them.

Even the Substack independent journalists have had to do that in order to survive. It’s just that their demographic is the few folks left who are desperate for something true. We still exist, and you can make a nice living appealing to us if you aren’t funding a huge newsroom. But each of these journalists, for all their success, brings in peanuts compared to a mainstream organization. Taibbi and Weiss will likely get moderately rich doing what they do, but even CNN rakes in huge bucks compared to them.

In the grand scheme of things their readership and income is small.

So will the MSM fess up and try to mend fences with Americans? Probably not. The incentive, at least so far, isn’t there. Any mea culpas on their part would alienate their base who still desperately want to demonize the dirty plebs.