Yeah, the mainstream media ended up getting behind some really nutso anti-Trump conspiracy theories. One of my favourites was the one about Trump supposedly usi

Yeah, the mainstream media ended up getting behind some really nutso anti-Trump conspiracy theories. One of my favourites was the one about Trump supposedly using DNS requests from email servers as a secret communication channel with Russia (and this one US chain of health clinics) because it made absolutely no sense on any level. It would make such a poor communication channel that using it would require some other communication channel that's better in every way and hasn't been found to agree what the supposed communications meant first (so why not just use that?), could only have been set up with the help of a subcontractor of a subcontractor who Trump had no reason to trust and yet who insisted no such thing happened, and all the evidence fits the alternative explanation of the DNS lookups being a normal response to receiving normal marketing emails about Trump hotels. About five publications rejected it for these reasons before it got published. Yet when it did, the New York Times got so much heat for pushing back in the gentlest way possible against the Clinton campaign's demands for the FBI to investigate - which went viral on social media - by saying that the FBI had looked into it and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal marketing emails that they eventually said it was the wrong decision and they wouldn't do it again. And the only thing that was described as a conspiracy theory by the mainstream press was the idea that all the evidence was consistent with the normal operation of email systems, even though that's what most technical people concluded regardless of political affiliation. There was some really heinous bullshit around the legitimacy of the 2016 election as well, which meant the press really didn't have a leg to stand on when then opined about how dangerous it was for Trump to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 one. Though of course that didn't stop them.