John Durham, Almost the Media’s Invisible Man

It is impossible to claim that the Mueller investigation and Trump-Russia collusion were dismissed or ignored by the media. It was quite the contrary. It was a huge and incessant story.

Rich Noyes from the Media Research Center discovered that between Jan. 20, 2017 and July 20, 2019, evening newscasts at ABC, CBS and NBC devoted an astonishing 2,634 minutes to Trump-Russian narrative.

On Feb. 12, the conservative media reported a “bombshell.” Well, the term “bombshell” is almost copyrighted as a journalism term for “Republican scandal deepener.”

Special counsel John Durham, tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s probe into Donald Trump and Russia, reported a client for Hillary Clinton’s law firm, Perkins Coie, was monitoring internet traffic at Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and the Executive Office of the President. They wanted information to sell a “narrative” of Trump-Russia collusion.

What is the coverage of ABC, CBS, and NBC? None. Other networks and major newspapers refused to believe it. Then, they stepped in to deny it was anything.

From the beginning, liberal partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff have trashed Durham’s probe as “tainted” by Trump’s desires for an investigation. On ABC in 2019, Schiff denounced it as automatically “illegitimate” because “when you win an election, you don’t seek to just prosecute the losing side, but this is what Bill Barr is seeking to do.”

Schiff spent four years investigating the winning side of 2016’s election. Saying a probe is “tainted” by partisan desire displays an incredible lack of introspection.

While the networks spent more than 2,600-plus minutes on the Trump-Russia narrative, they’ve done next to nothing on Durham. Let’s review just how much coverage Durham has received from the Big Three networks since Attorney General William Barr put him on the case in the spring of 2019.

ABC gave Durham’s probe nine mentions over the last two years and nine months. CBS had five. NBC had six.

Many of these were short mentions. On ABC, they came from Republican panelists on the Sunday show “This Week.” On CBS, two came in questions as Trump-hating FBI employee Peter Strzok sold his liberal-hack book on two CBS morning shows. (Has Durham reached out to you? No.) No.

Durham is the anti-Mueller. Nothing he finds is newsworthy. The media treats him as “tainted,” like he’s a news leper. “Unclean! Unclean!” Durham’s team isn’t loaded with liberal Democrats who leak juicy details to other liberal Democrats in “objective” media.

The media used the Mueller probe to constantly paint a black cloud over Trump’s presidency and present it in real time as perpetually doomed—even when it wasn’t. The walls were always “closing in” because that was the song they couldn’t stop singing.

To the media elite, Durham’s probe is only useful to the “right-wing media wormhole.” Facts don’t come first. The truth isn’t more important than ever.

Just imagine if we turned the Justice Department dockets upside down. Can you imagine what the “news” would sound like if we took all the enormous and incessant coverage of the DOJ prosecutions and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi investigations of the Jan. 6 riot and awarded that to the Durham probe? And made the Jan. 6 probes incomprehensible?

The facts about media coverage (and lack thereof) show that our media elite is a Democratic machine. That’s why most Americans don’t trust the “news.” Like Clinton’s shady lawyers, they are all about creating a partisan narrative, not reporting events “without fear or favor” as they unfold.

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