By Mark Hemingway for RealClearWire
Without much fanfare, earlier this week Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times investigative reporter Jeff Gerth dropped a thorough and damning four-part article dissecting the media’s obsessive reporting of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. Even more surprising, the report, “The Press vs. the President,” appeared in the internal organ of America’s most prestigious journalism school, the Columbia Journalism Review, which has long been considered the unofficial ombudsman for the media industry.
If CJR is finally comfortable admitting that the media’s Russiagate reporting is so scandalously bad as to undermine the entire industry, that seems like a remarkable admission.
On Twitter, Glenn Greenwald, a left-wing reporter who has made some significant career sacrifices for calling out the media’s bogus reporting on the matter, Gerth announced his report “Absolutely devastating about how casually, frequently, recklessly and passionately the press lied on Russiagate.” Gerth tells what happened so clearly that it is hard to imagine that a fair-minded reader who makes it through all 24,000 words of Gerth’s report will conclude any differently. Personally, I’m proud to say that the work of RealClearInvestigations – and my colleagues there, Tom Kuntz, Aaron Mate and Paul Sperry – was favorably cited by Gerth as one of the few media outlets that got the whole story right.
However, as a man who spent much of his time during the Trump years engaged in objective reporting questioning and refuting the Russian collusion narrative, my reaction was this. anger. It’s an undirected sentiment towards Garth, who has done a brave thing. But the piece’s appearance two years after Trump left office and nearly five years after special prosecutor Robert Mueller failed to substantiate anonymously sourced speculation about Russian collusion is itself a serious indictment.
To begin with, Garth demonstrates that the media still does not grasp the truth. His piece is full of big-name reporters and major publications refusing to comment on fundamental errors or dubious or unethical judgments. Here Gerth managed to get journalistic dashboard saint Bob Woodward in a document denouncing the failures of the media. While this is a significant concession, if respected figures like Woodward have misgivings about the media’s conduct, they should have been more vocal — and earlier.
It is also understandable why Garth would want to narrowly focus his reporting on what happened. But it is difficult to learn any important lessons from this sorry adventure without any substantive discussion of the media’s intentions. Gerth points out that Russiagate has led to an erosion of trust in the media and a stark warning that the media’s “failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what comes next.”
But this is inadequate. Without any broader context about the long history of manipulation of the American national security state or the evolution of the corporate media into left-wing ideologues, one might read Gerth’s dry reporting as a comedy of errors: a bunch of well-intentioned reporters, confronted. With the challenge of covering a troubled president — and staunch Democrats and partisan law enforcement officials — reports continue to get key facts wrong and commit grave sins of omission.
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However, a missing motive portends something much worse. The media’s Russiagate coverage relies heavily on officials in national security and law enforcement agencies who have historically been weak and hostile to civil rights. There is a saying in traditional journalism – “If your mother says she loves you, check it.” Yet, when “deep state” actors with clear animus for Donald Trump pushed the narrative that the US president had been compromised by a foreign power, the explosive story demanded thorough scrutiny at every step, opting instead to become a mainstream media stenographer.
The avalanche of details necessary to explain the story of the Russian Federation makes it seem that grasping the truth is more difficult than it is. If your willingness to believe Trump was compromised by Russia began as a political Rorschach test, it quickly became an IQ test.
Before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, the Logan Act was reportedly being used as a pretext to investigate Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The Logan Act is the phrenology medical science for national security laws — the never-enacted 1799 statute that made it illegal for private citizens to negotiate with foreign governments. Laughed at by constitutional scholars, it is routinely violated and invariably ignored.
Except that several major media outlets reliably reported on Flynn’s alleged Logan Act violations, when it should have been clear that this ancient and discredited statute was a desperate attempt to justify a politically motivated investigation, even though they were serious violations. What happened to Flynn is just one of many examples where the press has trivially ignored glaring facts.
Gerth does a good job of unraveling the story of how Flynn was railroaded by the Justice Department, as well as the absurd credibility of the press regarding the so-called “dossier” on Trump, an obviously unreliable document produced by partisans. Political enemies of the President. Nevertheless, many of Gerth’s examples of questionable interactions between the press and government sources require reading between the lines to assess how the press was willfully blind to the possibility of law enforcement officials abusing their power.
And given that the key players in the story are Democratic partisans, current and former spies and shadowy opposition researchers, it’s worth asking to what extent the press is being openly manipulated and deliberately misinformed. Although Gerth’s report suggests a conscious conspiracy, he doesn’t really go there.
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Finally, no accounting of the media’s flawed Russia reporting would be complete without seriously assessing the consequences. Again, this discussion is outside of Garth’s narrow focus on how sausage is being made in newsrooms. However, he comes closer to recognizing the gravity of the problem when he observes a lucky coincidence. The FBI’s dubious White House briefing to Trump and Obama on the dossier’s absurd allegations involving Trump and Moscow prostitutes — an event quickly leaked to CNN that catalyzed the Russiagate frenzy — occurred on Jan. 6, 2017, four years later. The day before the infamous riot at the US Capitol.
These two events are unrelated. Trust in the media has not been badly eroded by pundits openly agitating to oust tens of millions of Trump voters with a transparently false narrative that the president is a traitor. This made it impossible for the media to summon the institutional confidence necessary to convince Trump supporters and Trump himself that Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 election victory was legitimate.
The result is that poor reporting during Trump’s presidency has contributed greatly to an atmosphere of hysteria and distrust that has undermined Americans’ faith in elections, shaken the foundations of the republic, and made us all worry about political stability in the future.
So while Gerth’s careful reporting is noted and appreciated, it is unlikely to produce the self-examination and reckoning necessary to restore trust in the media and the important role they play in the democratic process. The media learned all the wrong lessons by getting away with it. My fear is that when asked about the massive failures of the media during the Trump years, Gerth’s article will be used as an excuse rather than an indictment. Yet members of the press who wish to avoid accountability should be able to point to their article and say “this is old news”.
Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.
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