Reporters lean over a barricade to talk to voters at a rally in Midland City, Ala. (David Weigel/The Washington Post)

MIDLAND CITY, Ala. — When they arrived at the final Republican rally before Tuesday’s Senate election, Roy Moore’s supporters were routed into a path between the TV cameras that had been set up all day. Protected by portable metal gates, they poured into the barn at Kelly Creek Nursery, half of which had been cordoned off for reporters. An aisle, about six feet wide, helped Moore’s special guests scoot quickly to a VIP balcony.

That aisle also protected them from reporters, more than 100 of them. Their very presence became a rallying point for Moore’s supporters, just as it had in 2016, when then-candidate Donald Trump would point to the media after his every word and get the crowd booing.

“We got the whole world here,” said former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon. “They’re all back there — the entire opposition party! Why are they here? CCCTV, China. The Financial Times of London. The Guardian. Come on, wave, Guardian!”

Guardian correspondent Ben Jacobs, an American reporter based in Washington, waved from a media table. He was greeted with cries of “fake news!”

Outside the barn, it was easy for reporters to mingle and talk to Moore’s supporters. That had been the case throughout the campaign, a dichotomy that’s become fairly ordinary in Trump-era politics. Conservative and liberal voters consume wildly different information, especially when news breaks that is potentially problematic for their side. Voters otherwise happy to tell their stories are told to question the agenda that brought reporters to them.

That was a running theme at Moore’s last rally, but it had shaped the race even before The Washington Post published the first interviews in which women alleged that a 30-something Roy Moore had made unwanted sexual advances toward them when they were teenagers. On Sept. 25, at his first public appearance for Moore — at the time, the insurgent candidate challenging Trump-backed Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) — Bannon blamed the media for elevating scandals that had nearly brought down Trump in 2016.

“The opposition party there, the media — they’re nothing but the running dogs for the ruling elites of this world,” said Bannon. “They didn’t come for Donald Trump to have a discussion about immigration. They didn’t come to have a discussion about trade. No. They were out to destroy Donald Trump personally.”

Weeks later, when The Post ran its first story about Moore’s accusers, the Moore campaign and Bannon dusted off the 2016 Trump playbook. As Joshua Green reported Monday for Bloomberg, Bannon and Breitbart attempted to discredit the story even before it was published, running interference for Moore’s campaign.

“Breitbart News obtained details of the forthcoming Post story from the newspaper’s letter detailing the allegations sent to Moore’s campaign for comment,” wrote Breitbart’s Aaron Klein.

Over the following weeks, as national Republicans decided to denounce Moore, Breitbart was at the center of a conservative media campaign to defend him. Frequently, the campaign promised bombshells that never flew. “They’re finding some collusion going on in stories about Judge Moore,” said Bannon of Breitbart’s reporters in a Nov. 10 speech. “I think you’ll see tomorrow.” No such story ran that week.

Yet the scandal turned Moore’s campaign, which had always positioned the candidate as an outsider, into one that made no effort to court anything but favorable media. At a series of “press conferences,” most of which were run at least partly live on cable news, Moore campaign staffers and allies attacked the credibility of Moore’s accusers and took no questions from reporters. A Nov. 16 news conference tumbled into chaos after reporters who had waited for two hours of speeches to end attempted to ask about the scandal and were berated for doing so.

“As Ronald Reagan said, we paid for this microphone,” said Janet Porter, a religious conservative activist who emceed the event. “We want to allow questions regarding issues, and not handle anything else about the unsubstantiated stories. The Washington Post is not evidence.” Moore himself left the event after Porter ignored two questions.

As the election drew closer, Moore’s campaign generally stuck to one answer on scandal questions — it was up to attorney Gloria Allred, who held a news conference with an accuser who was not part of The Washington Post report, to prove that her client was telling the truth by releasing a yearbook that contained Moore’s signature.

Meanwhile, One America News Network, a cable channel that covers the White House and Congress and was founded as a conservative alternative to Fox News, became a source of both positive coverage and stories that could cast doubt on his accusers. In November, the network ran an “exclusive” that suggested that Faye Gary, a police officer who had said Moore was watched closely when he went to high school events, could not be trusted.

“While Gary claims to have been a police officer in Gadsden, she also has a number of ties to the underground world of the illicit drug business,” reported OANN’s Pearson Sharp. “In 2008, her son Corddaryl Gary was arrested for distributing drugs. But before he could make it to trial, he was shot and killed.” That story was tweeted from the Moore campaign’s account.

While the Moore campaign held an unusually small number of public events, it publicized multiple stories that could have cast doubt on the allegations against the candidate. On Dec. 8, it got a lucky break — Allred’s client, Beverly Nelson, admitted to ABC News that she had added a date and location under Moore’s handwriting in her yearbook. The campaign held another no-question news conference, with lawyer Phillip L. Jauregui, who had originally challenged Allred, saying that the entire story had been thrown into doubt.

But to some confusion, the news conference ended with another accusation: that the original Washington Post story had been fed by Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush operative and co-founder of the opposition research firm America Rising.

That was a reference to a text-message exchange between Miller and a conservative operative that conservative sites — including Breitbart — cast as evidence that he had a role in the story. Miller denied the story, and the texts only revealed that he had complimented The Post’s reporting.

“Tim Miller had absolutely nothing to do with our story,” said Washington Post National Editor Steven Ginsberg last week.

Yet on Tuesday night in Midland City, several Moore endorsers cited the false story in rundowns of the ways the Republican nominee had been treated unfairly. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), the only member of Congress to campaign in person for Moore, used much of his speech to challenge the stories of Moore’s accusers, hinting that there’d be “a place called prison” for any accusers who had been paid off.

The war against the press continued all night. Meanwhile, the space in front of the barn had grown to fit every Moore supporter who’d come to Midland City. As the speeches went on, dozens of them trickled into the media section, sitting quietly next to reporters who sometimes gave them their seats.