Despite the efforts of some people in the “mainstream media” to downplay the information in Robert Mueller’s report that exonerates President Trump of collusion with Russia, at least one person has stepped in to point out the overwhelming bias on the issue over the past two years.
While a guest on the America’s Newsroom program on Monday morning, veteran Fox News analyst Brit Hume hammered media coverage of the investigation, which he called not only “bad reporting,” but also “the worst journalistic debacle of my lifetime.”
Hume described his use of the word “debacle” as “the political accusation of collusion, which occupied our media and our politics for now two years in all the ways that has been described in this enormous investigation, which has now cleared the president on this whole collusion narrative.”
He also stated:
I’ve been in this business about 50 years. I’ve never seen anything quite this bad last this long.
It was a terrible thing. It needs to be investigated. There needs to be a lot of soul-searching among many leading members of the media today and going forward.
Hume saved his sharpest barbs for the people “in this business, in our business,” whom he said “need to look back and say: ‘How in the world did several major news organs, networks, newspapers and so on devote so much time to what turned out to be utterly baseless speculation about the most serious crime you could imagine, mounting in some cases in the accusations we heard to treason?’”
At that point, co-anchor Sandra Smith asked her guest: “Are you seeing any sort of admission on that front among the Democrats, the media?”
“Alas, I am not,” he replied.
Instead, “I’m seeing a handful of honest liberal journalists who have no use for Trump agreeing that this was bad reporting all the way, and some of them have being doing it for some time.”
“The catalog of baseless speculation and wild accusation is very long indeed, and I’m seeing very few signs of any real introspection,” he added.
Instead, Hume noted, “[E]verybody’s now moving on to ‘Oh, well! There may be a possibility of obstruction of justice.’”
“I think that’s likely to turn out to be yet another wild goose chase,” he continued, and “the questions you heard in that news conference that Lindsey Graham held did not reflect well, I think, on members of the media about, you know, where we go from here and how we got here.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, this isn’t the first time Hume -- who had a 23-year career at ABC News before joining the Fox News Channel in 1996 and stepping down as the anchor of Special Report in 2008 -- returned to the public spotlight since he retired.
In January, he joined the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight in accusing several “fact-checkers” of “repeating Democratic talking points” instead of verifying information. As a result, “fact-checking has become a branch of opinion journalism.”
The former anchor of the weeknight Special Report program encouraged Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to “look into FBI and Justice Department behavior leading up to this getting started.”
During a news conference earlier that morning, Graham had called for a new special counsel to examine alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) at the start of the Russia collusion investigation.
“If the shoe were on the other foot,” the GOP official noted, “it would be front-page news all over the world.”
