The most obvious retort is that this means the mainstream media were behaving exactly like the rightwing media, so take the beam out of your own eye before you criticize the mote in ours. My response is two-fold. First, yes, the mainstream media succumbed to paranoia and sensationalism in covering Trump-Russia. Although the individual events they covered were true, the tendency to see a great conspiracy there, rather than wrong but disparate events, was a serious mistake. Nonetheless, this is what the rightwing media does all the time. The mainstream media is still more reliable, despite this lapse. But it does not excuse the lapse.
The book focuses on the election and does not say much about reporting on Trump-Russia, and rightly so. There was very little such reporting during the election. This bar graph lays out the total reporting. Of all stories, Clinton e-mails tops out at over 65,000 mentions. The second most common mention of of Hillary are various scandal stories about the Clinton Foundation at over 20,000. No policy story about Clinton even breaks 20,000.
For Trump, on the other hand, the number one story is immigration (40,000 mentions), followed by jobs (20,000). Five scandals each fail to break 10,000, with Russia being the smallest. The issue simply did not get enough play to have any effect whatever on the election. In fact, it seems fair to assume that one reason the press focused so much on Trump-Russia was by way of making up for its singular focus on Hillary's e-mails, which did much to throw the election to Trump.
The book also offers a good refutation to anyone who says that being so hounded by false accusations explains, though it does not excuse, Trump's claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Trump made exactly the same claim in 2016 when he expected to lose.
Finally, the book offers several cases after the election of the mainstream media making mistakes that were unfair to Trump and correcting them. Some dealt with Russia; some did not (pp. 214-221). In one such story, ABC falsely reported that Michael Flynn was going to testify that Trump instructed him to contact Russian officials during the campaign. This was corrected within hours and the reporter suspended for four weeks (p. 216). In another, CNN mistook the date that Wikileaks sent Donald, Jr. a decryption key to its e-mails, falsely indicating that he received the key before the e-mails were made public. The Washington Post spotted the error, and CNN issued a correction by the end of the day. A Time reporter mistakenly reported on inauguration day that a bust of Martin Luther King had been taken down. He promptly apologized and issued a correction. The same happened when a Washington Post reporter prematurely reported that half the seats at a Trump rally were empty. (They later filled up). CNN falsely issued, and corrected, a report that James Comey would say that Trump was a target of investigation. Another incorrect story, by CNN, created the impression that a conversation with a sanctioned Russian investor was under investigation. Three reporters lost their jobs over the story. The only story the authors found that was not retracted dealt with a claim that the Trump Administration suppressed a report on climate change.
So, this is seven stories, four addressed to Russia and three not. The authors make the point that among the mainstream media, it is prestigious to spot an error in a rival publication's story and point it out, and shameful to make a mistake. In the rightwing media, what matters is whether a story serves the ideological narrative, and retractions are made only under threat of suit.
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