f you think that professional reporters regularly invent stories out of whole cloth, it may seem defensible to do so yourself in the name of fighting fire with fire. So when a conservative operative tried to pose as a victim of former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in order to dupe
The Washington Post into reporting a false charge against him,
her cover was blown when reporters uncovered a post she had written in which she gleefully announced that she’d “accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [
sic] of the liberal MSM.”
There’s also a feedback loop between Trump—and Republicans in Congress—and the conservative media. Trump tweets out policy statements based on the nonsense he sees on
Fox and Friends, while Attorney General
Jeff Sessions names a prosecutor to follow up on House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes’s (R-CA)
discredited claims suggesting that Kremlingate is a “deep-state” conspiracy and the real problem is the FBI’s supposed bias against Republicans. There’s an alternative narrative for every damning story about the regime, even something as straightforward as
EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s notorious penchant for traveling first class on the taxpayer’s dime.
So if you watch Fox and read
Breitbart, it’s quite likely that you believe the Trump regime has been disciplined and effective and free of scandals, while the mainstream press continues to cover up the greatest political crimes of our generation, all of which revolve around the Clintons or Barack Obama. It’s a scam, but one that works to keep those who want to believe it in the fold.