Sadly, that's exactly correct. The MSM will have no problem with utterly discounting it and will smell chum in the water and double down.
You know one of the reasons that Trump won last fall despite that unprecedented onslaught of attacks against his business, his family, his character?
He didn't take the normal Repubican playbook and get defensive. He fought back and fought back twice as hard.
You didn't see him trotting out lines of character witnesses, he "counterpunched." (Yes, character witnesses came out, but they came out on their own and weren't paraded, either in person or in writing, by the campaign)
True, but frankly, irrelevant as there would never be a trial.
Trump has taught all of us that the only way to deal with this type of sliming is to hit back and hit back harder.
This press release by the Moore campaign was a weak thing to do. Far stronger was the counterpunch by Moore's attorney attacking the credibility of the "yearbook signature" and demanding to have it made available for investigation...and then the coup-de-grace was pulling out the 1999 divorce proceedings showing that Moore was the presiding judge over the case. Gloria Allred was utterly flummoxed when she was confronted with this points by, of all people, Wolf Blitzer.
If the Moore campaign would've wanted to trot out these character witnesses, they should've had them independently contact friendly reporters. Similar to the former Gadsden Mall manager being "found" to refute the claim that Moore was banned from the mall. Had the Moore campaign put out his information as a press release, it would've been weak. But since the media "found" the mall manager directly without intervention from the Moore campaign, it is virtually impossible to refute (ignore, sure...refute, no way).
The audience for these statements was not us.
It was the people of Alabama, to whom character still matters.
And it will be effective there.