Jeff Gerth was a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist at the New York Times for 29 years. He has just published a searing indictment of mainstream journalism in the magazine of the Columbia University Journalism School. He lays out just how badly major news outlets covered the story of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia both before and after the 2016 election.

Gerald Baker, the former editor of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, summarizes:

“The real collusion, it seems, was between members of the press, officials hostile to Trump, prominent Democrats, former journalists, and spooks, all spinning up a story that the man elected president of the United States was a Russian intelligence asset.”

The New York Times brushed off his repeated questions about obvious inaccuracies it’s reporting with the bromide that “we stand by our reporting.”

But the Times’ coverage came under fire at the time by its own public editor, Liz Spayd who “complained that the Times was operating under different standards at different times.”

She was later forced out and her job was eliminated.

This takedown of the “Russiagate” story helps explain why Gallup reports only 34 percent of people to have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in mainstream media. A full 38 percent say they have none at all, the highest ever recorded.

The Times boasts of being the “newspaper of record.”  When will the editors apologize to their readers for a fake media story that was completely bogus right from the start?