This is a point I’ve made repeatedly.

The media has obvious ideological reasons for running smear campaigns of President Trump, but its members also have obvious financial ones.

The New York Times hit piece on the Comey memo earned the paper its most concurrent readers per second. Pretty good for a piece about a piece of paper that the leftist paper had never even seen and which was, supposedly, described to it by one of Comey’s associates.

But that didn’t stop it from racking up over 6 million views.

Media fake news isn’t just an agenda. It’s enormously profitable. Hit pieces powered by anonymous sources bring in over 100,000 readers in an age when live is king. For individual reporters, finding a source, real or fake, that can back up the left’s Trump conspiracy theories can put them on the map.  

…

The Washington Post has racked up viral hit fake news stories backed by anonymous sources. And it’s paying off. The Post claimed a traffic increase of 50% at the end of last year with a 75% increase in new subscribers. 

Now the Post has hit $100 million in digital revenues and added hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. All of this is quite a change from a few years ago when the Post was losing $50 million a year and Baron was talking about shrinking the newsroom.

Why did The Atlantic pull the same stunt? Because it liked what it saw.

That’s the point that CNN (which benefits from the same fake news dynamic) unintentionally makes.

Since introducing a paywall a year ago, The Atlantic has added 325,000 paid subscribers. More than 20,000 of those new subscribers signed up just over the past weekend after The Atlantic published Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s now viral article, “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.'”

Follow the money, folks.