Can the Media Survive Mueller?

What’s the future of news outlets that decided it wasn’t news if Steele was lying?

The Mueller report may add tidbits about Donald Trump’s business or personal associates that excite a certain type of journalist: the kind who thinks that when one accusation against Mr. Trump has been debunked, the answer is to find another.

Still, to anyone who didn’t just fall off the turnip truck and enter the news business, every tendril senses which way the Trump-Russia story now will be trending until the final chapter is written.

A casual conversation between a lowly campaign associate and a dubious London professor over whether the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton is not going to sprout new and deeper significance. The phantom sources of Christopher Steele are not about to gain flesh and walk among us.

Big-story dynamics go from unpredictable to predictable at some point. Unless a Russian spy turned himself in to Mr. Mueller, much of what he learned comes from existing U.S. intelligence collection, which long ago failed to establish collusion…

For many of the country’s most prestigious news organizations, the question becomes whether they have sewn themselves into a moral straitjacket and now will abdicate coverage of the biggest story of the next two years to upstart rivals on the right.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Journalists were not wrong in being open to Christopher Steele (a paid advocate) and his handlers (also paid advocates), but they were wrong not to notice that the one incontestable fact Mr. Steele had put before them had nothing to do with Mr. Trump and Russia.

Unless you are an exceptionally dim journalist, whenever somebody peddles a salacious story to you, a question naturally and unbidden leaps to mind: Is the real story the one I’m being peddled? Or is the real story the fact that I’m being peddled it?

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