The Ukraine scandal is testing the limits of the conservative media spin operation

These days, the conservative news media ecosystem generally works like this: a constellation of fringe websites churns out heavily skewed stories that either misinterpret or fabricate information in order to create narratives that defend President Trump’s reported misconduct. If those same stories can accuse his opponents of an unfounded conspiracy theory, all the better.

The stories then make their way to Fox News’s prime-time opinion shows. From there, they’re disseminated through a vast network of television talking heads, elected officials, and right-wing content aggregators — finally landing themselves on the president’s Twitter feed. Rinse, repeat.

Over the weekend, the system sprung into action in response to the Ukraine whistleblower scandal, the biggest threat Trump has faced yet. The broad tenets of the scandal are this: According to a whistleblower complaint and a call memo produced by the White House, Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Vice President Joe Biden, only a few days after requesting that nearly $400 million in aid to the country be frozen. While Trump alluded to American aid efforts before bringing up Biden in his call with Zelensky, he did not explicitly link the two, per the White House’s reconstructed transcript.

View the complete September 30 article by Ezra Marcus on the Mic.com website here.