CNN: We're so sorry, Mr. Scaramucci, but not America

In isolation, a CNN story about one minor Trump associate being investigated by the Senate regarding one discussion with Russians–a false report that was retracted–shouldn’t be a big deal. But the monolithic main stream media’s obsession with taking down Donald J. Trump & Co. is not to be considered in isolation.

An editor's note from CNN https://t.co/5bHxUVnHHt pic.twitter.com/W3IjT5FPN8

— CNN (@CNN) June 24, 2017

It’s been Russia, FBI, intelligence community, Russia, Kushner, and more Russia since last November. Actually it was Russia a year ago, but Paul Manafort’s departure from the Trump campaign sent much of it underground like a magma vent under a volcano. We’ve seen lots of ash spewing from the media, but little actual lava.

It's ok. I did nothing wrong. They like hitting friends of @potus who are loyal advocates on his behalf. https://t.co/58LdPff6bV

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) June 22, 2017

Blockbuster stories are thrown high into the air, but the retractions or walk-backs are invariably in small print mostly invisible to the 90 percent of Americans who browse the news a few times a day for headlines.
The media has traded its tradecraft and legitimacy for killer headlines and “All the President’s Men.” They’re wrong so much on so many things, we don’t know what to believe. As Matthew Continetti wrote in National Review:

The fact is that almost the entirety of what one reads in the paper or on the web is speculation. The writer isn’t telling you what happened, he is offering an interpretation of what happened, or offering a projection of the future. The best scenario is that these theories are novel, compelling, informed, and based on reporting and research. But that is rarely the case. More often the interpretations of current events, and prophesies of future ones, are merely the products of groupthink or dogma or emotions or wish-casting, memos to friends written by 27-year-olds who, in the words of Ben Rhodes, “literally know nothing.” There was a time when newspapers printed astrology columns. They no longer need to. The pseudoscience is on the front page.

Worse, actually. The 27-year-olds are directed by 50-somethings whose appetite for taking down the president guide them in very unwise directions. This has been so for about 20 years or more–even since Reagan. But now it’s become so obvious and naked in the age of Internet memes and “fake news” that nobody can paper it over (pun intended).
A quick Google of Jared Kushner headlines from New York Magazine exposes a pattern–building a case against him like a competent prosecutor. They paint him as a slumlord, a bad businessman, a Russian stooge, a water-carrier for his father-in-law, an ambitious twit, and a man in over his head. All of the above at the same time.
A Boston Globe article on June 23 went back 15 years to Kushner’s time at Harvard dealing in Somerville (a Boston suburb) real estate.

“My impression was that he was more interested in practicing playing hardball than being effective as a landlord,” Neafsey recalled of the young man who one day would marry Ivanka Trump and land an official role as a high-level adviser to President Trump.

This is just as much a hit job as Time Magazine‘s cover story “The Good Son.” Kushner has become the media’s Scooter Libby, someone who can take the fall to damage the boss, like Libby did in the Valerie Plame fiasco.
The Scaramucci story was just another cog in the bash Kushner narrative. It was false. How much more that the media has published in this vein is also false? It’s no wonder the president pushed so hard for someone official in the government to publicly state he wasn’t under investigation.
We better hope Robert Mueller gets to the bottom of this quickly. The media will only continue its march into conspiracy and raw speculation until the truth stops them. Once the Trump-Russia collusion story is dead, I won’t hold my breath waiting for the media to apologize to America for it like the did to Anthony Scaramucci.