You may argue with the politics of Devin Nunes — even I might — but as an investigator in this matter he told the truth, while counterparts like Schiff and Feinstein did not. Virtually all major media outlets share in the profound shame of implying that Nunes was a witting or unwitting agent of Russia just for writing a memo that turned out to be true. Moreover, by exacerbating a public panic in moments like this, both these press outlets and politicians like Schiff, Blumenthal, and Eric Swalwell (who said Nunes sought to “torch every floor” of the FBI) really did feed a “mass delusion,” for which they need to answer.

By the way, if the Steele report is wrong, and it is, that’s another K2-sized peak of Russia stories that has to be tossed out, from tales implying Russia had an ability to blackmail Trump or recruited him to be a spy in the eighties to suggestions — there were a lot of them, in print — that Trump agreed to soft-peddle Russia policy in exchange for Russian favors. Years of Steele-centric CNN and MSNBC broadcasts have to be apologized for. Rachel Maddow went on air in January of 2017 and argued the Steele material must be right, because the FBI would tell us otherwise, and “They’re not saying that. They’re not saying anything.”

Some outlets have chosen to try to sneak through this scandal, and sweep the problem under a rug. Many for a while now have pumped out features designed to convey the impression they never made the mistakes they did. The Washington Post, for example, which won a share of a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting that included dire warnings about “a troubling pattern of fictitious news stories” pushed out by Russians “across social media,” quietly ran a piece last week about a study by New York University concluding, “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters.” They didn’t mention their own history of saying otherwise, and being rewarded for doing so, in the article.

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.

[That won’t happen either. And we’re seeing that in the coverage of the Biden documents scandal now, in which the media is extending its hypocrisy over its excuses for Hillary Clinton while pillorying Donald Trump for the same crimes on a much smaller scale. Now the media wants to argue scale in defending Biden. It’s shameless and highlights the main fault with Taibbi’s otherwise-excellent thesis — these institutions stopped caring about “truth” years ago, let alone “reconciliation.” — Ed]