“For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest,” the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, “that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team, and his eventual administration.”

Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — a 2018 National Reporting prize shared by the Washington Post and the New York Times for reporting on Russiagate — did no such thing.

It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy that we now know never existed.

Oh, it was “deeply sourced,” in that deep-state Democratic bureaucrats, furious that Trump had won the White House, were falling over themselves to talk anonymously to reporters.

And it was “relentlessly reported,” or at least just relentless, as the newspapers were obsessed with taking down the Trump administration.

Yet reading these pieces four years later, one is struck not only by how irrelevant they are, but how shlocky — tinged with McCarthyist alarmism of a red under every bed. Two major newspapers that hold themselves up as the pinnacle of press freedom, the “truth dies in darkness” brigade and all that, pushed a conspiracy theory.

As a lesson in mass delusion, it’s worth going through the 20 stories that make up the Post and the Times’ award-winning series to show just how damaging they were: to the truth, to the newspapers’ reputations — and to America itself.

mote at nypost.com

feature image credit Wally Gobetz Flickr