Talking to graduates of the varsity of journalism on the University of California at Berkeley in 2019, Recent York Times podcast The Every day producer Michael Barbaro said the media’s primary responsibility then was to “earn back its credibility.”
Let’s think back for only a moment to where we were then:
Donald Trump was still president, and life in America was yet to be upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and the federal government’s response. That is six weeks before Robert Mueller testified before Congress, and three years before recent ownership at Twitter released the corporate’s files about shadow-banning dissonant voices. Yet a outstanding voice within the legacy media felt compelled nonetheless to inform the rising generation of journalists something that was actually true.
Columbia Journalism Review Jeff Gerth has taken that mandate to heart. In a four-part review of how the mainstream media covered Trump, Russia and the investigation, he finds plenty that went off the rails of best practice of objective journalism:
“News outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as forthright in examining their very own Trump-Russia coverage, which incorporates serious flaws. Bob Woodward, of the Post, told me that news coverage of the Russia inquiry “wasn’t handled well” and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.” He urged newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.””
Gerth goes on within the second installment to attract a stark and alarming contrast between the established practice of the press covering national security issues to how this modified within the coverage of Russia-gate, specifically James Comey’s actions after telling President Trump “I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.”
Before, after all, he leaked his memo of that conversation. Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, then proceeded to coordinate disclosures in regards to the investigation with useful media pegs:
“It was a twist to the symbiotic relationship between the media and the national-security apparatus; often, reporters use pending government motion as a peg for his or her stories. On this case the federal government cited the media for its actions.”
Now perhaps it makes more sense why CNN continues to make use of McCabe as a commentator far beyond his actual expiration date.
The entire manner by which the since-debunked Steele dossier was inserted into the media is itself an illustration of the upside-down nature of how the media and key Washington institutions reacted to the salacious report that veteran reporter Bob Woodward called “a pile of garbage.” The research firm Fusion-GPS, headed by two former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters, leveraged its relationships within the Fourth Estate to make sure the shoddy dossier got maximum coverage. Of special interest is the instruction they gave my old boss David Kramer to not share the fabric with the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Cullison because Cullison, who had spent years in Moscow, would see from the outset it was a fabrication. While there’s nothing recent about selective releases, the degree of deception involved here suggests an effort not to tell, but to hoodwink.
And even today, we remain somewhat at the hours of darkness about who actually paid for the Steele dossier. The list of potential sponsors ranges from vulture capitalist Paul Singer (when it was meant to profit the Jeb Bush campaign) to the Hillary Clinton campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who most recently made the U.S. news because he’d also allegedly been paying the FBI’s senior counterintelligence agent in Recent York City Charles McGonigal.
[RELATED: Ex-FBI Agent McGonigal Involved in Russia-gate Indicted For Violating Russia Sanctions…]
Gerth is just not the primary to conduct a post-mortem on one of the vital glaring disinformation campaigns in recent American memory. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald breaks down a number of the biggest media fails of that period here, and in 2021, The Washington Post removed two articles it had run in regards to the dossier the warmth of Russia-gate mania.
The Recent York Times, which has yet to return the Pulitzer Prize it earned for its correspondent and Stalin-stooge Walter Duranty penning glowing reports of the Soviet regime in 1931, which then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used as pretext for initiating diplomatic ties with a government that went on to murder 20 million of its own residents, has been predictably slower to acknowledge its mistakes.
Still, the Grey Lady has within the last 12 months “disappeared” some of its coverage from Russia-gate, following the lead of other outlets.
What Gerth has done is compile a useful case study in his series for the following generation of American journalists along with some sharp evaluation. No matter where one finds oneself on the political spectrum, it’s well value a read.
