Longtime Fox News veteran Brit Hume sounded off on the ongoing media fiasco in America.
Hume said the mainstream media’s handling of President Donald Trump coverage is the biggest catastrophe he’s ever seen in all of his 50 years in journalism.
The latest revelations out of Washington, he says, prove it.
Pundits say that evidence is mounting that FBI and CIA officials connected to former President Barack Obama not only lied about Russian collusion in the Trump administration, but were intentionally directed to carry out a smear campaign on Trump officials.
Hume warned this could be a pattern in the future.
“As for the journalism involved in the pursuit of that story, the collusion narrative that we lived with for so very long before it was blown up in the Mueller report, it was the worst journalistic fiasco of my more than 50-some years of journalism. It was a disaster.”
The media spent more than two years hammering Trump over unproven allegations in a salacious and discredited dossier. And they predicted that special counsel Robert Mueller would find evidence of a host of crimes.
But none of that ever materialized as Mueller ultimately found no evidence against the president or his campaign.
Now, Hume is warning that this scandal is about to take a turn and strike one of the media’s favorites amid new questions over Obama’s role in the now-infamous events during and after the 2016 election.
More specifically, what role the former president may have had in the attacks on and investigation into former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn.
“It appears that the president [Obama] had encouraged the Justice Department, the FBI, not to tell Donald Trump about what they’d been looking into with regard to Flynn, although they were happy to tell him about the preposterous ‘pee tape’ that was supposedly part of that… discredited dossier,” Hume told Bret Baier in another interview.
Trump has retweeted reports saying Obama used his final weeks in the White House to target the incoming members of the his administration, including Flynn.
He’s also called Obama’s alleged role in the scandal “the biggest political crime in American history, by far.”
Hume said there may be something to it.
“We have some more to learn about what President Obama may have done and said about all this and whether he may have directed the whole thing,” he said.
Just don’t expect to hear much about it in the mainstream media.
In his conversation with colleague Martha MacCallum, Hume pointed out that the media literally rebuilt itself to cover a Trump scandal – and when it turned out that collusion scandal didn’t exist, they didn’t stop the coverage.
He pointed to comments made last year by New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, who bragged about how the newspaper set up its coverage of the Mueller probe and the allegations against Trump.
“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” he told Slate.
Hume pointed out the inherent problem with that.
“He had set up his whole newsroom, his whole journalistic operation was to cover that story, and it ended up going nowhere,” he said.
That, he said, led to bias built right into the coverage – because they simply couldn’t back off a story they had built their newsroom around.
“It was a terrible journalistic misjudgment, and it was rooted in their view, in my opinion, it was rooted in their view of Donald Trump that when this charge arose, they thought so little of him and that he was such a terrible person, that it had to be true,” he said.
Now, Hume is warning that they’re at it again.
They’re approaching just about every Trump-related story with this same mindset.
And that includes the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think the coverage of the coronavirus epidemic has reflected this,” he said. “Now, there’s a desire to see this thing as, the shutdown should continue endlessly, and anything that points in that direction, they love, and anything that doesn’t, they don’t.”
It’s something to bear in mind in the coming weeks for anyone watching how the media handles the reopening of the nation.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”