Will Rachel Maddow Face a Reckoning Over Her Trump-Russia Coverage?

• Will Rachel Maddow Face a Reckoning Over Her Trump-Russia Coverage?
  by Ross Barkan, https://www.theguardian.com/
  With Trump has come two years of conspiracy-mongering about Russia – and at the top of the heap is none other than MSNBC’s Maddow
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  The worst-kept secret in the liberal media ecosystem is that Donald Trump is great for business. Rebranded for the resistance, liberal newspapers gobbled up thousands of new subscribers while local outlets die across America, unable to feast on the Trump manna. On television, left-leaning stations, at long last, competed with Fox in the ratings game, fueled by a never-ending Trump obsession.
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  With Trump has come Russia: two years of conspiracy-mongering about whether the president, a failed real estate mogul and reality TV star consumed with dubious deal-making, conspired with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Robert Mueller’s determination that no evidence exists to prove Trump and Russian colluded to fix the election has exposed, once again, the venality of A-list political punditry. At the top of the heap is none other than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
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  Maddow, of course, was not alone. The New Yorker once ran a cover in Russian, a stunt that will age as terribly as all cold war-era red-baiting has to our 21st-century eyes. Last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait baselessly posited (in another cover story) that Trump may have been a Russian “asset” since 1987. CNN was a daily carousel of Russiagate pundits.
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  “We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets,” said the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, in an interview after the Mueller report came in. “It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality,” he added. Other news executives have also defended their coverage. CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, said: “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.”
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  Still, it’s abundantly clear now that many liberal outlets overdid it in their fervor. And Maddow, MSNBC’s ratings juggernaut of the Trump era, is the embodiment of this overzealousness. The Mueller investigation was covered more on MSBNC than any other television network, and was mentioned virtually every day in 2018. No twist was too minuscule or outlandish for Maddow; every night, seemingly, brought another nail in the coffin of the soon-to-be-dead Trump presidency.
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