The Trump-Russia saga and the death spiral of American journalism.

Originally published in Substacks by the author on 25.02.23

Translated and adapted by Rubens Turkienicz for Brasil 247.

Reporters make mistakes. That's the nature of the job. There are always some stories we wish we had reported more carefully. Writing with a deadline of only a few hours before publication is an imperfect art. However, when mistakes occur, they must be acknowledged and publicized. Covering them up, pretending they didn't happen, destroys our credibility. Once that credibility is gone, the press becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for a select demographic. Unfortunately, this is the model that now defines commercial media.

 The failure to accurately report the Trump-Russia saga during the four years of the Trump presidency is bad enough. What's worse, the major media organizations, which produced thousands of stories and reports that were false, refuse to engage in a serious post-mortem. The systemic failure was so blatant and so widespread that it casts a very problematic shadow over the press. How can CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Mother Jones admit that, for four years, they reported lewd and unverified gossip as fact? How can they justify to their viewers and readers that the most basic rules of journalism were ignored, in order to take part In a witch hunt, a new and virulent McCarthyism? How do they explain to the public that their hatred of Trump led them to accuse him, for years, of activities and crimes he did not commit? How do they justify their current lack of transparency and dishonesty? This is not a pretty confession, so it will not happen. American media outlets have the lowest credibility – 26 percent – ​​among 46 nations, according to a 2022 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And with good reason.

 The business model of journalism has changed since I started working as a reporter, covering conflicts in Central America in the early 1980s. Back then, there were some major media outlets that sought to reach a broad audience. I don't want to romanticize the old press. Those who reported stories that challenged the dominant narrative were targeted, not only by the US government, but also by hierarchies within news organizations like The New York Times. Ray Bonner, for example, was reprimanded by editors at The New York Times when he exposed egregious human rights abuses committed by the government of El Salvador – which the Reagan administration funded and armed. He resigned soon after being transferred to a dead-end job in the finance section. Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which served as the basis for the film "The Killing Fields". Subsequently, he was appointed metropolitan editor at The New York Times, where he assigned reporters to cover the homeless, the poor, and those evicted from their homes and apartments by Manhattan real estate developers. Schanberg told me that the newspaper's Executive Director, Abe Rosenthal, mockingly referred to him as his "resident communist." He canceled Schanberg's twice-weekly column and forced him out of the newspaper. I saw my career at the newspaper come to an end when I publicly criticized the invasion of Iraq. The career-killing campaigns against those who reported on controversial stories, or expressed controversial opinions, did not go unnoticed by other reporters who, to protect themselves, practice self-censorship.

 However, the old media, because they sought to reach a broad audience, reported on events and issues that did not please all of their readers. Certainly, they left much out. They gave too much credibility to government officialdom, but, as Schanberg told me, the old news model undeniably didn't "let the swamp get deeper by letting it fill up more."

 The advent of digital media and the compartmentalization of audiences into antagonistic demographics has destroyed the traditional model of commercial journalism. Devastated by the loss of advertising revenue and a sharp decline in audience and readership, commercial media outlets have a vested interest in serving those who remain. According to internal surveys, the approximately 3,5 million new digital subscribers to The New York Times acquired during Trump's presidency were overwhelmingly anti-Trump. A feedback loop began, in which the newspaper fed its digital subscribers what they wanted to hear. It turns out that digital subscribers also have very thin skin.

 “If the newspaper reported something that could be interpreted as supporting Trump, or wasn’t critical enough of Trump,” Jeff Gerth, an investigative journalist who spent many years at The New York Times, recently told me, sometimes they would “cancel their subscriptions and go to social media to complain about it.”

 Giving subscribers what they want makes commercial sense. However, this is not journalism.

 News organizations, whose future is digital, have simultaneously filled their newsrooms with those who are tech-savvy and able to attract social media followers – even if they lack reporter skills. The New York Times' Baghdad bureau chief, Margaret Coker, was fired by the newspaper's editors in 2018 after management alleged she was responsible for their star terrorism reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, being barred from re-entering Iraq – an accusation Coker consistently denied. However, it was well known to many at the newspaper that Coker had filed several complaints about Callimachi's work and considered him unreliable. Later, the newspaper had to retract a highly acclaimed 12-part podcast – “Caliphate” – hosted by Callimachi in 2028, because it was based on the testimony of an imposter. “Caliphate represents the modern New York Times,” said Sam Dolnick, an assistant managing editor, when announcing the podcast’s launch. The statement proved true, though somehow Dolnick probably didn’t anticipate it.

 Gerth – a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who worked at The New York Times from 1976 to 2005 – has spent the last two years writing an exhaustive look at the systemic failure of the press during the Trump-Russia story, authoring a 4-part, 24.000-word series published by the Columbia Journalism Review. This is an important, albeit depressing, read. News organizations seized upon any story, no matter how unverified, to discredit Trump and routinely ignored reports that cast doubt on the rumors they presented as facts. You can see my interview with Gerth. here.  

 In January 2018, for example, The New York Times ignored a publicly available document showing that the FBI's chief investigator, after a 10-month inquiry, found no evidence of collusion between Trump and Moscow. This omission was compounded by reliance on sources that spun fabrications designed to appeal to Trump's detractors, as well as a failure to interview those accused of collaborating with Russia.

 The Washington Post and NPR (National Public Radio) incorrectly reported that Trump had weakened the Republican Party’s position on Ukraine in the party platform because he objected to language calling for arming the Ukrainian state with so-called “lethal defensive weapons”—a position identical to that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. These outlets ignored the platform’s support for sanctions against Russia, as well as its call for “appropriate assistance to the Ukrainian armed forces and greater coordination with NATO defense planning.” The news organizations amplified this accusation. In a column in The New York Times that called Trump a “Siberian candidate” [an allusion to the film], Paul Krugman wrote that the platform had been “watered down to blandness” by the Republican president. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine, described Trump as a “de facto agent” of Vladimir Putin. Those who tried to denounce this false report, including Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, were ignored.

 Following President Trump's first meeting with Putin, he was attacked as if the meeting itself proved he was a Russian puppet. Later, The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote about the “disgusting spectacle of the US president bowing down to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.” Rachel Maddow, MSNBC's most popular host, said the Trump-Putin meeting validated her coverage of the Trump-Russia allegations “more than anyone else in the national press” and strongly implied – as her show's Twitter account and YouTube page explicitly stated – that Americans were now “grappling with the worst-case scenario that the US president is committed to a hostile foreign power.”

 Gerth points out The anti-Trump reporting hid behind a wall of anonymous sources, often identified as "people (or person) familiar with"—The New York Times used this thousands of times in stories involving Trump and Russia between October 2016 and the end of his presidency, as Gerth discovered. Any rumor or slander was included in the news cycle, with sources often remaining unidentified and the information unverified.

 A routine soon took shape in the Trump-Russia saga. “First, a federal agency like the CIA or the FBI would prepare a secret briefing for Congress,” writes Gerth. “Then, Democrats or Republicans would selectively leak excerpts of it. Finally, the story would be published, using a vague attribution.” These hand-picked pieces of information greatly distorted the conclusions of the briefings.

 Reports alleging that Trump was a Russian asset began with the so-called Steele Dossier, initially funded by Trump's Republican opponents and later by Hillary Clinton's election campaign. The accusations in the dossier – which included reports of Trump receiving a "golden shower" from prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room and claims that Trump and the Kremlin had ties dating back five years – were discredited by the FBI.

 “Appearing on Fox News, Bobo Woodward called the dossier a ‘piece of junk’ that ‘should never have been part of an intelligence briefing,’” Gerth writes in his report. “He later told me that the Washington Post wasn’t interested in this harsh criticism of the dossier. After his statements to Fox, Woodward said he ‘contacted the people who covered it’ at the newspaper, identifying them only generically as ‘reporters,’ to explain why he was so critical. Asked how they reacted, Woodward said, ‘Honestly, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post about what I had said, why I had said it, and I accepted that and didn’t want to force it on anyone.’”

 Other reporters who exposed the fabrications – Glen Greenwald at The Intercept, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, and Aaron Mate at The Nation – have clashed with their news organizations and now work as independent journalists.

 The New York Times and The Washington Post shared Pulitzer Prizes in 2019 for their reporting on "Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connection to Trump's election campaign, the president-elect's transition team, and his administration."

 The silence of the news organizations that perpetuated this fraud for years is sinister. This cements in place a new media model, a model without credibility or accountability. The few reporters who responded to Gerth's investigative piece – like David Corn at Mother Jones – repeated the old lies, as if the mountain of evidence discrediting their reporting, most of which came from the FBI and the... Mueller Report, did not exist.

 Once a fact becomes interchangeable with an opinion, once truth becomes irrelevant, once people are told what they want to hear, journalism ceases to be journalism and becomes propaganda.