The two big flaws of the media’s impeachment coverage — and what went right

… Six weeks ago — before Marie Yovanovitch’s stunning testimony, before Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s appalling statement that he would work hand in hand with the White House on a Senate trial strategy, before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “don’t you dare” glare at her own members — I urged the news media to rise to the most difficult challenge of the Trump era so far.

Their test was to cover the impeachment proceedings without getting mired in the usual traps: false equivalence; distraction by presidential stunt; rampant speculation; the use of squishy language; and what I called Barr-Letter Syndrome, a reference to the way the mainstream press allowed Attorney General William Barr last spring to mischaracterize the findings of the Mueller report.

Now that Trump has been impeached, it’s not possible to say that the mainstream media has earned anything close to an A. CONT.