The Media Got Rewarded for Their Trump-Russia Lies

CLAY: A lot of the people who bought into the things that are not true are not smart enough to do their own research, and so they just trot out, trumpet, whatever the talking points are. This is why I’ve said, Buck, that Rachel Maddow disappoints me on the whole Russia collusion thing. She’s so smart that she should be intelligent enough not to make this mistake. A lot of other people just aren’t that smart in media, and so they take whatever people tell them and just run with it as talking points.

BUCK: Well, Maddow laughed all the way to the bank about Russia collusion and also got to.

CLAY: She lied for years about Russia collusion.

BUCK: For years, she was the primary host at MSNBC, and she was the only one during the Trump era who had rates that would sometimes, in prime time, even eclipse some of the Fox prime time, the only show. And it was, you know, this crazy Kremlin nonsense night in, night out — all of which was crap. I mean, if you’re watching Rachel Maddow during the Trump years, you were getting a steady diet of lies.

CLAY: Mueller was going to be their savior. He was going to lead Donald Trump being taken out of the Oval Office — this is what they believed — in handcuffs because of his collusion with the Russia government.

BUCK: People were told this, and it’s amazing to watch now as the actual prosecutions begin of those who fabricated the Russia collusion lie. Not a single person in a privileged perch in the media has come out to say, “Wow, I am so embarrassed. I cannot believe what my show said. I need to make this right! I need to tell me my audience the truth. We need to have some accountability in this.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They used a lie to oppose Donald Trump — not just in rhetorical terms — to weaponize the federal government against him as part of the Russia collusion hoax. Trump was right. When he called it a witch hunt, he was spot-on. It was a hundred percent true, and there’s no accountability whatsoever. You have people who think that their brand is supposed to be truthful journalism, people like Fake Tapper over at CNN. He should be begging the forgiveness of his audience. But he doesn’t, because he was in on it, because all that mattered was that it was anti-Trump, Clay. We know. It didn’t matter that it was all a lie.

CLAY: Not only are there no consequences, the exact opposite, Buck. All of these people have been given more. Rachel Maddow just signed a $30 million-a-year contract and she’s not even gonna have host her show anymore come the spring or summer of ’22. They are paying her, at MSNBC, a unbelievable salary that directly rewarded her for peddling 100% untruths. And she doesn’t have any obligation…

Buck, you and I, you can agree or disagree with a lot of what we say. But if we get a fact wrong on this show, we come on and we say, “Hey, sorry. We didn’t mean to get that wrong. We try to vet everything to make sure.” Now, opinions are different. Everybody can have a variety of different opinions. But in terms of factual bases upon which we base our opinions if we get something wrong on a fact?

We’ll come back and say, “Hey, we got that wrong, turns out that wasn’t true,” ’cause we want to be as honest with you as possible, even though we don’t consider ourselves to be Big J journalists, we are, with this show, fortunate enough to talk to a large audience every day, and we don’t want to spread things that aren’t true, which is what MSNBC and CNN and the Washington Post and the New York Times did. And, by the way, Buck, rewarded themselves with Pulitzer’s! Big, new contracts! All of it predicated on lies surrounding Donald Trump.

BUCK: It’s stunning to see how little self-reflection there is among the corporate media at this point that went along with the Russia collusion nonsense because it was… It’s not as though there were some aspects of it.

CLAY: All lies.

BUCK: The entire thing was a fabrication of the Hillary Clinton-paid-for DNC sponsored dossier. A bunch of people wrote up rumors and then pretended that the rumors had some gravitas so they could run it to the FBI and the corporate media, who were basically playing ping-pong with the lie. This is what they did. This was the primary news story for Democrats in America for the first three years of Trump’s presidency.

Without question, for three solid years, until covid came along, the biggest news story in America — and in some ways, therefore, the world — was a giant lie and these same individuals and organizations (New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, et cetera) they now want to lecture all of the rest of us about covid, about election laws, about everything, about Kyle Rittenhouse self-defense.

They act like we’re supposed to take them seriously when no person who got the Russia collusion story wrong should ever be taken seriously again until they come forward and say, “I was part of a massive fraud. I’m embarrassed and sorry, and I will do better.” I have not seen a single person, not one, in the media say that.

CLAY: And they won’t, because they are liars and because they got rewarded for their lies.