With CNN and MSNBC both reportedly going through hard times, it’s worth recalling perhaps the greatest corporate media hoax in recent memory. From the very beginning of the first Trump presidency in 2017, practically every journalist in America was frothing at the mouth about the latest national security scare: “Russia hacked the election!” This story would turn out to be not just a pernicious lie, but also evidence of an insidious symbiotic relationship between leftwing media, the DNC, and alphabet soup DOJ agencies.

The claim “Russia hacked the election” suggests that somebody broke into voting machines and physically changed votes. It suggests that the software used to conduct and tabulate the 2016 election was in some way compromised by Russian agents. But that never happened. Nobody even alleged that it happened. So what actually did happen?

As it turns out, not much. According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Russians in 2016 bought about $150,000 worth of political ads on Facebook, supposedly in order to sew “disunity.” And during the 2016 election, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta clicked a phishing link he received in a scam email, and subsequently lost access to his account and has his emails published online.

That’s basically it. The astute reader may notice that none of that behavior even comes close to resembling the hacking of an election. Yet high-level DOJ officials and their pet journalists dutifully portrayed this clumsy situation as “Russia hacking the election” on a near-daily basis, for more than a year.

Just look at how easily they lie:

 

 

The purpose of this lie was to lend credence to the Clinton campaign-originated conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was a covert Russian asset, installed by Putin through a rigged election process. This accomplished two things: it garnered public support for the poorly-predicated Mueller investigation, and it played into the idea that Trump was somehow an illegitimate president.

When Mueller concluded his investigation in 2019, having found basically nothing that indicated Russia had hacked any of our election infrastructure, the claim of Russian election hacking — which had been a media catchphrase for over a year at this point — abruptly vanished from the airwaves without explanation. No journalist offered any clarification, there was no “Sorry, we got this one wrong guys.” The media just quietly moved on.

All of that brings us to today, with the latest developments in leftwing cable news world spelling dark days ahead for the serial hucksters and hoaxers on TV. Multiple news outlets report that CNN will be laying off hundreds of employees as a result of their dismal election day-ratings, and according to Puck News, Comcast is looking offload MSNBC as dead weight.

So in honor of the hundreds of “journalists” who may very well soon be out of a job, we decided today was a good day to remind readers of some of their finest work: a hoax so dishonest and pervasive that its effects are still apparent in American politics today.