Bret Stephens is responding to Dennis Prager's argument in the pages of the New York Times.
"Is the News Media an ‘Existential’ Threat?" Stephens asks. He's criticizing Prager for arguing so, but instead of rebutting him launches into a series of warnings about Putin and Russia.
And that's all well and good. Putin is a bad guy. Russia has fairly consistently been a foe of varying degrees of intensity. The growing aggressiveness of China and Russia, in territorial expansionism and cyberwarfare, is a serious issue.
But what Stephens doesn't do is attempt any defense of the media. Which is also well and good. He's writing this at the New York Times.
Prager distinguishes between a values threat and a physical threat. But let's assume, as Stephens argues, that Putin is both. It's still the media that weaponized him.
Unlike many of the sudden newly invented Russia experts, Paul Roderick Gregory has been writing about Russia for decades. And he has one of the better pieces on Putin's agenda. The article delves in depth into the media's latest Trump Jr. scandal, but it's the ending that is most important.
We have reached the stage I warned about three months back. Vladimir Putin is now in a position to destroy the Trump presidency and wreak untold havoc on the American political system. His disinformation specialists can make up virtually any story they wish of Trump's cooperation with Russia, and the anti-Trump media will accept it as gospel truth. Putin will get his wish of a weakened and embattled American president and an American political system in paralysis. He will continue to feed the story to make sure no resolution is possible.
The ironical outcome is that the real collusion may be between the enemies of Trump making an alliance with Putin to weaken their own country, all in order to overturn an election outcome they despise.
Foreign enemies want to destabilize the American political system. And it's largely the media that is doing the destabilizing.
Any Russian plan that depends on releasing damaging information has to be vectored through the media. It just doesn't work otherwise. The underlying threat is still the media.
As long as the media is obsessed with using any available tool to destroy their opponents on the right, it remains an existential threat.
Once upon a time the media eagerly covered up Soviet atrocities. Not much has changed. The agenda of the left still trumps everything else.