The Signal story turned out to be one of the most disturbing and revealing political stories of the year. Unfortunately for critics of the Trump administration, it’s not disturbing for the reasons they want to portray. Instead, it is yet another episode that discredits the legacy media.

By abusing the unintended access he was given, The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg has given all his future potential sources real reason to worry. Everyone now knows that he will disclose confidential government material, demonstrating how foolish it is to give him access to it. Did he show us some important misconduct in his revelations from the Signal chat? No. He just wanted to embarrass the administration by disclosing information he obtained under murky circumstances.

Even worse for the legacy media, however, is that they’ve discredited themselves by showing how far they will go in covering a fake, silly story, and how easily distracted they are by these nonevents, to the point of neglecting real news—and I’m not just talking about the Trump administration’s action regarding the Houthis.

It turns out that in the shadow of the Signal scandal, President Donald Trump was able to rush into the void and abolish by executive order scores of federal worker union bargaining units. This astonishing move was nearly unremarked upon by our media. Indeed, I stumbled upon this story, quite by accident, in the Times of India. You are probably hearing about it for the first time.

The order states, “The agencies and agency subdivisions set forth … are hereby determined to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.” The order then lists several pages of agencies and offices now “excluded from union eligibility.” This executive order will end union representation for a significant portion of the federal workforce.

Federal unions, long a stronghold of Democratic Party power, are going to suffer a significant blow as a result of Trump’s action. With the Democratic Party already floundering, how will this impact domestic politics going forward? The media has not bothered to look.

Moreover, Republicans regard teachers’ unions as the biggest obstacle to educational excellence—even bigger than the federal Department of Education itself. The precedent set by ending federal union representation is sure to be studied by critics of teachers’ unions. The move abolishing union rights will not immediately end these unions, which are voluntary organizations of employees. But it will end the automatic recognition of their representation. Impacted agencies will no longer need to treat the union as representative of the workforce. And that includes teacher unions.

In a world where the Democratic Media Industrial Complex was competent and on-the-ball, this news would have had wall-to-wall coverage at MSNBC and other leftist outlets. Since the order was issued on March 27, however, our press has been stuck on its coordinated coverage of the Signal scandal and manufactured hypothetical panics like whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was drinking while he was texting in the chat. I like to call this part of the story “Whiskey-Gate” because it sounds like the name of an op that was written to match a preconceived story idea. It’s good writing but (if you’ll pardon the pun) a little old-fashioned. Smearing enemies with booze accusations is an old divorce-lawyer trick. It doesn’t require any evidence, and no one can prove himself or herself innocent.

The obsession the media has with this apparently manufactured story, down to the detail about Hegseth’s hypothetical drinking, just shows that they are not organically monitoring real news pipelines. This is what scripted media and propaganda looks like. It is designed to accomplish a purpose, and that purpose is not to cover the news.

One can predict that Trump might run this play the next time the legacy media organizes around an anti-Trump “scandal.” While MSNBC reads from their prepared scripts, Trump can use the news black-out to make big moves.

I learned several important things from Whiskey-Gate: First, there’s an obvious difference between real events and a coordinated news op. To be effective, an op needs to drive the news cycle. But the push to make it work deprived the media of its ability to react to an obviously more substantial real event.

Second, Goldberg outed himself, once again, as a completely unreliable source of information. By the way, does Goldberg even know how he got added to the chat? I can’t find any indication that he does. If he doesn’t know, then he can’t rule out the possibility that he just got played by being either “blue-dyed” or “red-caped.” A blue-dye op refers to selectively leaking slightly different stories to employees to root out leakers. “War plans,” are perfect for such an op because they contain specific details that vary from person to person with the purpose of fingerprinting each version of the story to the leaker. For example, you could tell Sally the attack will happen at 10:30. But you tell Jeff it happens at 11:00. When Jeffrey Goldberg breaks the story with “11:00” in the chat, you know Jeff is your leaker. A red-cape is a story that attracts media attention away from a more serious story. That’s also a possibility in this instance.

I strongly suspect an intentional leak of some type. Either the cabinet had a mole, a hacker was involved, or the group added Goldberg to the Signal chat intentionally to sell the distraction.

Moreover, few are asking what Goldberg’s window into the Trump administration actually revealed about its inner workings. This is probably because it did not reveal what Goldberg was hoping it would reveal. Rather than seeing a cabinet barreling headlong into rash action, we saw a cabinet working and deliberating together as a team, including JD Vance questioning whether the operation helped Europe more than America. Trump supporters leery of foreign military intervention liked what they saw in those Signal messages, and I think Goldberg realized many other Americans would like it, too. That’s why the substance of the conversation has never been the story.

One thing is clear. This isn’t 2017, when the Trump administration was the victim of constant leaks, internal disloyalty, and unrelenting media attacks. This time Trump understands the landscape, and he’s playing the media, rather than getting played.