Availability Bias

From the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins, What the FBI Coverup is Covering Up:

Even so, it’s hard to imagine future historians ignoring the truth. Our hugely expensive intelligence establishment made a fool out of itself and our democracy over two likely low-budget Russian intelligence pranks: the Steele dossier and the fake information that sparked Mr. Comey’s Hillary interventions.

Unlike previous disclosures of intelligence-agency skulduggery, these episodes do not emit any faint air of competence or zealousness in the national interest. They involve the FBI messing with the most sacrosanct of our democratic rituals, the selection of a national leader, and so clumsily that it produced the opposite of its intended result.

I have speculated that some patriotic desire to protect America’s faith in its government may be behind the resulting coverup, or simply a desire to protect the FBI, an agency Mr. Mueller once headed. But I doubt our press has any such higher purpose. It has become so besotted with availability bias—a social science term for the need to conform to accepted tropes—that it no longer has a nose for a real story. Instead it relies on leaks, and even whole “narratives,” dropped in its lap by manipulators who assure reporters they are on the side of the angels. This is what accomplished leakers like Mr. Comey have done for years but the William Barr Justice Department apparently won’t. It waits for a supposedly independent press to show up with intelligent questions that never come.