Mueller memos illustrate media’s great divide

If Sean Hannity had been working in the 1970s, his Fox News Channel colleague Geraldo Rivera believes that President Richard Nixon would have never needed to resign because of the Watergate scandal.

It’s not clear whether Rivera thinks that’s a good thing; Fox refused to let him speak about his recent assertion on Hannity’s radio show. But it does speak starkly to the power of Fox’s most popular figure and devoted supporter of President Donald Trump at a time when the media’s partisan divide seems wider than ever.

The point is driven home by the continuing coverage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump and, in the past two weeks, about the Republican-written memo on the probe.

Fox, CNN and MSNBC, which are now more political talk than news channels, have been consumed by the story. On the day the GOP memo was released, the different worlds they inhabit couldn’t have been clearer.

“This is Watergate times a thousand,’’ Hannity said, charging the FBI with deliberately misleading a federal judge. The “deep state,’’ Hannity’s term for government officials opposed to Trump, was undermining his presidency and democracy itself. The media, excepting him, have been sitting on the sidelines as the scandal unfolds, he said.

“This is so deep in its corruption that it should shatter the conscience of lawabiding American citizens,’’ he said.

Flip over to MSNBC at the same time, and Rachel Maddow was laughing.

“That’s it?’’ she asked. “That’s all they got? That’s what all the hype was about?’’

Not only did the memo not live up to claims made about it, even by the president, it factually undermined the accusation that a dossier paid for by Trump opponents had triggered the investigation into the Trump team’s Russian ties, she said.

Then she turned to Fox, whose headquarters is across a Manhattan avenue from Maddow’s studio.

“They have been hyping and hyping and huffing and puffing, working their audience up into a frenzy for two solid weeks,’’ she said.

“They have literally built a right-wing public movement that this memo must be released, because this memo will fix the Trump presidency, it will fix the Russian scandal for President Trump. It will make the whole thing go away.’’