The Lure of the Fan-Service Scandal
These sagas are powerful tools for motivating a base or keeping it frothed up, but they don’t usually work well as tools of persuasion.
Perhaps, one of these weeks, Special Counsel John Durham will crack open serious wrongdoing in the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. This is not that week.
But following a Friday filing by Durham, a Justice Department attorney appointed in 2019 to investigate the investigation, many right-wing outlets insisted it was, and pilloried the mainstream press for giving the filing short shrift. Eventually, the mainstream outlets grudgingly obliged, and what they found is, well, not much: The filing comes in a case against a lawyer who worked for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. In the fantasy version, the filing shows that the Clinton and detail, it does not demonstrate this at all.
