By Michael Goodwin
Nearly seven years after most media abandoned standards of fairness in a stampede to defeat Donald Trump, it is widely accepted that those outlets can not be trusted to deliver accurate reports. Rather than perform the journalists’ duty of informing the public of news, many of today’s reporters and editors concoct narratives about events that consistently align with the agenda of the Democratic Party.
This overt embrace of partisanship is a major factor in two developments roiling the nation. The first is a hardening of polarization that deeply divides voters and leaves government unable to agree on solutions to even basic problems.
The second is that mistrust of the media is proving contagious, with Americans losing faith in most institutions, including those in the private sector as well as government.
Even the military, which long stood above the political fray, suffers from declining public trust, adding to fears that America is headed toward a second civil war and is more vulnerable to foreign adversaries.
Understanding this moment of peril is essential to appreciating the importance of a new work about how the media veered off track in its war against Trump. The author, veteran investigative journalist Jeff Gerth, follows the admonition to show readers what happened instead of merely telling them.
His exhaustive dissection in the Columbia Journalism Review is a case study that demonstrates in detail exactly where Big Media, especially The New York Times and Washington Post, made critical errors in their coverage of the Russian collusion story.
Naturally, all the key mistakes ran in the same direction. Most, including suggestions Trump and others committed treason, have never been corrected despite being proven to be false.
Times’ stubborn resolve
Gerth writes that even now, the Gray Lady brushes off his repeated questions about obvious inaccuracies with sweeping statements to the effect that “we stand by our reporting.”
In fact, the mountain of mistakes and exaggerations Gerth cites is so enormous that it had me thinking of “Scoop,” Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel about shoddy journalism.
As in the 1938 book, fierce competition for the big story again resulted in sensational claims and assertions that were unrestrained by facts.
Thus, it is not incidental, as Gerth told me in an interview, that some people inside the Times early on “thought this was another Watergate and the paper was again getting beaten by The Washington Post.”
His subject is not virgin territory, of course, and many of us have written extensively about the disgraceful media performance that started during the 2016 campaign and continues. We now know that rupture with tradition was not a one-off, and the freedom from facts and fairness that marked the first Trump campaign coverage unleashed an unquenchable thirst for ideological combat.
Nearly every story in many outlets these days revolves around race, climate, transgenders or some other -ism that demands instant conformity with the far- left’s latest hobby horse. Meanwhile, the media act as battering rams against American history and culture, with law enforcement, the First Amendment and the nuclear family under assault.
Gerth’s work stands out as the definitive account of the origin of this modern nightmare and is uniquely valuable because he builds a brick-by-brick case. Reading the 26,000-word, multi-part project requires a commitment, but the payoff is total clarity.
Thanks to his precision and the organizational skills needed to keep a steady focus through reams of articles, interviews, testimony, reports and transcripts, some of them separated by years, never again can the culprits credibly claim innocence. If this were a trial, they would all be found guilty beyond any possible doubt.
A few gems he produced have made it into wider circulation. His interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post resurrected Woodward’s forgotten 2017 statement that the infamous Steele dossier was a “garbage document.”
Woodward told Gerth there was a “lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the [Washington] Post” about his criticism and he thought readers were “cheated” by bad coverage of Russiagate.
Some numbers Gerth produced bear repeating. The Times, addicted to anonymous sources, used variations of a “person familiar with” more than 1,000 times to shield its sources’ identity.
Showing how the wall-to-wall coverage consumed the nation, Gerth reports there were an astonishing 533,000 articles published about Russia and Trump or special counsel Robert Mueller in the 22 months of Mueller’s probe. The number comes from NewsWhip, a media analytics company, which said the articles led to 245 million interactions on social media.
Big sections of his piece focus on several articles in the Times and Washington Post that serve as a framework for his findings.
Those papers are fair game not only because of their large audience and influence, but also because they shared a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the collusion story.
The Pulitzer citation said the papers’ work “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
The exposé that wasn’t
In reality, the totality of the newspapers’ work furthered confusion and misunderstanding and several cited stories have been discredited. For example, two of the 10 articles the Times submitted centered on the 2016 meeting Donald Trump Jr. and others from the campaign had with a Russian lawyer.
For weeks, the meeting was depicted as a “gotcha” moment, but the whole thing turned out to be much ado about very little. Yet the Pulitzers and the Times never acknowledged the overreaching claims.
Trump, whom Gerth interviewed twice, called for the Pulitzer board to rescind the prize and when it refused, he sued.
As Gerth notes, the board did reveal it had commissioned two “independent” reviews of the 2018 awards and both found “no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” so the awards “stand.”
He adds that the board did not disclose the names of the reviewers it picked or release any actual work product, only the conclusion.
So much for media transparency!
We saw four years of their gutter level liberal journalism under Trump and then they wonder why no one trusts them anymore and the sales of newspapers and magazines is tanking
Every time the “greg” account keeps repeating the lie that Trump tried to “overthrow” an election, they lose a little more power.
Mostly because they want you to believe the fake-website propaganda reality they are trying to set up somehow negates the fact that Trump is utterly and completely exonerated on camera.
Meanwhile, they have a general named Milley who LITERALLY confessed to high treason but nothing happened…and they want to say they are defending the Constitution.
They are the enemy.
Do not forget Esper the scumbag who agreed to a pact with milley to defy any military related orders from Trump, the commander in chief.
Most are not stupid; or, at least, not as stupid as the left assumes and hopes we are. It is now abundantly clear that the media and most functions of the government operate at the behest of the DNC (who operates at the behest of Soros). Under those conditions, there is no reason to trust such institutions. They’ve been caught in bold-face lies and there is no reason not to assume they will lie again and don’t lie on a regular basis, for not only do they lie but they do not denounce those among them who lie.
They were cheated out of respect for their intelligence, but they were fed exactly what they wanted. Democrats hated Trump because he defeated Hillary. They hated him, just like they hated Bush 43, because he interrupted the continuation of the Obama regime, just like Bush interrupted the continuation of the Clinton regime. But, they needed a tangible REASON to hate viscerally, so they were fed “Russian collusion” and “Russian agent” accusations to give their hatred a face. Many probably didn’t believe it anyway; but they wanted to have their hatred stoked.
NYT and WaPo got a Pulitzer for propagating a lie and serving the left, not for excellent reporting. It couldn’t be for reporting because there was none; all they did was repeat lies that, if they even bothered to research them, they would have KNOWN were lies. And most of the leftist media was just as dutiful while labeling anyone that wouldn’t get on board as liars.
Many still believe this bullshit because, one, it was never based on fact and, two, they haven’t found anything else to suitably replace Russian collusion (it doesn’t seem “insurrection” can quite fully replace it). It doesn’t matter if it’s been PROVEN false; it simply sounded good.