They could have done far more damage to Trump's campaign by simply doing what they should as reporters, rather than scurrying for any opportunity to inflate an incident and manufacture a nice scandal.
Pretty damn doubtful, that. Over the course of the last year the fourth estate
did, at one point or another, just about everything they should have as a reporter. It's one of the most screwed up parts of the last year or two's media cycle, that just about friggin' everything involved had the information needed to figure things out (truth, relevance, etc., etc.) just kinda' out there and barely anyone could seem to notice, particularly for more than a day or two.
Functionally no one gave a flying fuck about it. Folks didn't care about the criminal actions and legal history, about the business incompetence and malfeasance, about the ethical character outside of the couple of points of it that got attention, and so on and so forth. So the bastard news venues decided to give their viewers what they
did care about, and every last bit of it was flooded with bullshit. FTFE, yes, but they only get part of that blame. A lot of what they did was just because they were responding to what the population was signaling they wanted.
Thinking that if somehow the news just put out proper investigative journalism, it'd make the difference, flies in the face of the last while's reality. When they do, it gets ignored or barely acknowledged, and half the time folks immediately flock to a blatantly fabricated bullshit rebuttal, about as much just because it's
there as anything. It's another one of those points where it'd either take something draconian or a internal shift in their viewer base before it changes. People don't want news, they want a show, and until that stops -- or at least reigns its bloody self in -- they're going to get a show more than they get news and we're
all going to get fucked by it.