Vindication edition
Becket Adams
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It’s a hopeful sign that a growing number of journalists are taking a hard look at the media’s coverage of former President Donald Trump’s administration, with many concluding that, yes, corporate media behaved terribly during those years.
It suggests there may be hope yet for this industry. After all, admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.
In January, the Columbia Journalism Review published a decisive four-part takedown of the press’s mishandling of the Trump White House, including their slipshod and oftentimes unethical promotion of the “Russian collusion” narrative, which posited the former president conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
“No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate,” said CJR Editor-in-Chief Kyle Pope. “The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes and embarrassing retractions and damaged careers.”
As we know now, this “Russian collusion” narrative imploded in 2019 when a special counsel’s investigation (which included 40 agents, 2,800 subpoenas, some 500 search warrants, and 500 witness interviews) concluded it could not “establish that the members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
So much for all those breathless reports, all those “bombshell” news “scoops” suggesting the former president worked hand-in-glove with the Kremlin to steal the election. And though it was clear at the time the media were behaving irresponsibly and sloppily, CJR’s 18-month investigation, spearheaded by freelance journalist Jeff Gerth, who spent 30 years at the New York Times, puts the full breadth and scope of the media’s mishandling of the Trump presidency into perspective.
For example, Gerth identifies the media’s overreliance on anonymous sources as one of the chief failings of their coverage of the Trump White House. As a reminder, in journalism, anonymous sources should be used only as a last resort, not the go-to for information. Major media outlets know this, but groups, including the New York Times, relaxed the usual standards for the Trump era.
Gerth writes [emphasis added]: “One frequent and vague catchphrase — ‘people (or person) familiar with’ — is widely used by many journalists: the [New York Times] used it over a thousand times in stories involving Trump and Russia between October 2016 and the end of his presidency, according to a Nexis search.”
“The last executive editor I worked for, Bill Keller, frowned on its use. He told the staff repeatedly the phrase was ‘so vague it could even mean the reporter,'” he added.
If you’re a journalist, this isn’t groundbreaking stuff. Journalists know, and generally follow, this guidance. But not for the Trump White House.
The Washington Post declined several of Gerth’s requests for comment. Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron declined to be interviewed. Washington Post editor Sally Buzbee and “other Washington Post” journalists likewise declined requests for an interview. The Washington Post was awarded a Pulitzer for its “Russian collusion” coverage. The Atlantic didn’t “respond to an email seeking comment.” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who claimed during an appearance on MSNBC that the Steele dossier supposedly implicating Trump in a Moscow plot “was looking better and better every day, more and more credible,” declined Gerth’s request for comment. A spokesman for NBC declined to comment.
“Other outlets mentioned in this piece declined to discuss their anonymous-sourcing practices,” Gerth writes.
The broader press obviously must have a lot of work to do to address the industrywide dysfunction and corruption that allowed outlets to get so many Trump-era stories wrong. There’s even more work to be done to repair the trust that has been lost due to its sloppy and unethical “reporting.” But CJR’s unrelentingly thorough and unflinching four-part takedown is a good start.
Hamilton 68
Speaking of thin, unreliable sourcing, freelance journalist Matt Taibbi published a similarly damning report revealing that a go-to “source” for the legacy media’s coverage of online Russian disinformation is, in fact, an outright propaganda machine.
Hamilton 68, a neoliberal think-tank that claims to specialize in disinformation research, “spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments” regarding the supposed pervasiveness of Russian agitprop on U.S. social media,” Taibbi writes.
“Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s ‘research,’” he adds. “Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.”
Taibbi continues, writing:
“The problem is: Hamilton 68’s research methods, which were hidden from the public, including the newsrooms that so eagerly promoted the think-tank’s “data,” are not just sloppy. They’re intentionally deceiving, as internal Twitter documents reveal.”
Upon a closer examination, Twitter executives discovered that the “accounts Hamilton 68 claimed were linked to ‘Russian influence activities online’ were not only overwhelmingly English-language (86%), but mostly ‘legitimate people,’ largely in the U.S., Canada, and Britain,” Taibbi writes.
“The two founders of Hamilton 68, the blue-and-red team of former counselor to Marco Rubio Jamie Fly and Hillary for America Foreign Policy Advisor Laura Rosenberger, told Politico they couldn’t reveal the names of the accounts because ‘the Russians will simply shut them down,'” he adds.
Yeah, this is clearly a lie.
“One look at the list reveals the real reason they couldn’t make it public,” Taibbi rightly notes. “This was not faulty science. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how ‘Russia’ influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.”
And the U.S. press, that supposed bulwark of truth and democracy, ate it up, not even pausing to question whether the “data” points were accurate or even truthful.
Nearly as bad as the initial scandal of newsrooms blindly repeating Hamilton 68’s garbage “research” is the fact there has been no transparency whatsoever from the media regarding this major muck-up.
“I asked for comment from a huge range of actors — from the Alliance for Securing Democracy to … editors and news directors at MSNBC, Politico, Mother Jones, the Washington Post, Politifact, and others. Not one answered. They’re all going to pretend this didn’t happen,” Taibbi writes.
This is par for the course. I’ve covered both Congress and the media. In my experience, it’s easier to get a comment from a member of the House or the Senate than it is to get a comment from a news editor or even an ombudsman.
Transparency is a beloved thing in the media — unless, that is, it’s transparency for how the media operate. These things only ever tend to go one way.