Selective Scandal Syndrome

I have commented on this oddity a number of times. Brian Cates puts it nicely in The ‘Wrong Scandal’ Keeps Winning.

There’s no longer any real competition between the two major political scandals that emerged following the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Proponents of the first scandal, commonly referred to as “Russiagate,” claim that the man who had just won the election was an undercover agent who took orders straight from Moscow.

The other one that emerged held that Russiagate was always a false construct of the rival Hillary Clinton campaign and its politicized allies within the federal government’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This second scandal came to be called “Spygate.”

One of these scandals was indeed fake and the other was very real.

Most of the U.S. media went all-in on the proposition that the fake scandal was real and the real scandal was fake.

However, the scandal that was endlessly promoted by mainstream news outlets turned out to be a hoax, as shown by the investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Meanwhile, the scandal they dismissed as a “wild conspiracy theory” turned out to be real.

That means all the mainstream news media organizations, with their vast budgets and massive manpower, managed to get the major story of the 2016 presidential election exactly backward.

Russiagate, the fake scandal, the zombie article of faith of the mainstream media, staggers on in its last death rattle while Spygate, the real scandal, gathers steam.

The dying media clutch at Russiagate, turning a blind eye to the increasingly obvious Spygate scandal.

And astounding demonstration of a shared institutional article of faith defying actual abundant evidence.