Finally, a little media accountability.
Finally, a little media accountability
I t isn’t just that the media failed in covering Russiagate during the Trump years. Since then, they have displayed a near-total unwillingness to examine their role in whipping up a national hysteria based on paranoia and confirmation bias.
In other words, the media have piled a lack of accountability on top of their original sins of journalistic incompetence and ideological malice.
Now, at least, there is a prominent exception to this comprehensive failure in the form of a massive four-part series in Columbia Journalism Review on the coverage of Russiagate by the former New York Times reporter, Jeff Gerth. (Erik Wemple of the Washington Post is another honorable exception.)
Gerth has the goods on how the press botched the story from beginning to end, and he lays them out in detail. Given his pedigree, the piece is heavily focused on the Times, but he easily could have done another 24,000 words on the hysteria at CNN alone.
The piece is not revelatory in the sense of breaking news — anyone who has followed Andy McCarthy’s work over the years will be familiar with the outlines of Gerth’s account. But the reporter (an erstwhile Times man from the heart of the journalistic establishment) and the outlet (the bible of legacy-media self-evaluation) make it a very important event.
Gerth details how the media hyped the dossier, though it should have been clear it was garbage from the beginning, and how it spun up the collusion narrative despite the evidence that there was nothing there. The federal investigation into collusion, predictably, turned up nothing, surprising journalists who had been repeatedly telling their readers and viewers that the walls were closing in (resorting to understatement, Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the New York Times, described the Times as “a little tiny bit flat-footed” when the Mueller investigation flopped).
The reaction from the legacy media to Gerth’s report has been crashing silence, proving his point of how outlets aren’t willing to grapple with the scale of their dereliction.
There has been some pushback, though, from the progressive media, which is shocked and outraged by CJR’s perceived betrayal. Aren’t we all supposed to be in this together?
David Brock, no one’s arbiter of standards for anything, asks, “How did Jeff Gerth’s garbage get published in the Columbia Journalism Review?”
Question: How did Jeff Gerth's garbage get published in the Columbia Journalism Review? @CJR
https://t.co/y52oTTLsMr— David Brock (@davidbrockdc) February 4, 2023
Joe Conason accuses Gerth of having “betrayed basic journalistic standards.”
Progressive writer and activist Tom Watson can’t understand why CJR published the piece.
I understand why Jeff Gerth wrote this. Ideology and personal grudges. I can't understand why @cjr and @kylepope published it. And why there has been no retraction or even clarification after pointed and accurate criticism by @JoeConason and @DavidCornDC. https://t.co/KEgHJTcKsZ
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) February 4, 2023
Jonathan Chait, who wrote that Trump might have been a Russian asset since 1987, isn’t persuaded. A lesser journalist might be somewhat abashed by his claim about Trump — clearly preposterous at the time, and now even more so — but no, it’s Gerth who has screwed it up.
Chait points to an attempted takedown of the Gerth piece by David Corn of Mother Jones.
Persuasive @DavidCornDC response to the long Jeff Gerth piece on the Russia investigation https://t.co/SgHl4SWkS0
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 2, 2023
Corn argues that Gerth is focused on the wrong things — namely, the dossier that played a big role in kicking things off and the accusation of collusion, which resulted in the yearslong investigation that deranged our politics and media environment.
Corn thinks the real story is items such as the Russian interference in the election and Trump’s unwillingness to call it out; the Trump Tower meeting; and Paul Manafort’s communicating with Ukrainian and Russian figures during the campaign.
All of these things were bad, but none of them should have caused the media and investigatory conflagration that ensued.
Russia’s cyber-operations were negligible — laughably ineffective and barely a drop in an ocean of campaign messaging. The intelligence community’s assessment that Russia hacked the DNC emails may be true, but it is based on sketchy evidence, and, more to the point, the DNC emails — in which Hillary Clinton was not a meaningful participant — had no impact on the outcome of the election.
The Left’s freak-out about Trump’s characteristically impudent quip that he hoped Russia found Clinton’s emails has always been overwrought — the homebrew server was then in the FBI’s custody (i.e., not available to be hacked).
The motives behind the Trump Tower meeting were contemptible, but the meeting came to nothing, and it would not have happened as it did if there had actually been a Trump-Putin conspiracy. Moreover, the dossier misadventure showed that Clinton was no stranger to welcoming Russian-sourced research — no matter how flimsy — to use against her opponent.
Finally, the Trump-campaign information that Manafort shared with a Russian oligarch to whom he owed a great deal of money was trivial. After two years of investigation and two indictments filed against Manafort, Mueller never alleged that Manafort was a Russian agent. He was accused of failing to register as a Ukrainian agent — based on activities unconnected to his participation in the Trump campaign.
It’s notable that even Corn concedes that Gerth scores points on the Times and other outlets for exaggerating the case for collusion and the credibility of the dossier. The way Corn puts it, with admirable mildness, is “readers who care about media reliability will find much to ponder in this long takedown.”
Uh, yeah. Would that all the people who created this fiasco — beholden to a self-reinforcing frenzy and an overall ethic of “too good to check” — were willing to admit the same.