Columbia Journalism Review: The Press Versus The President (1 Viewer)

[SaintForLife]

Looking back on the coverage of Trump

Seven and a half years ago, journalism began a tortured dance with Donald Trump, the man who would be the country’s forty-fifth president—first dismissing him, then embracing him as a source of ratings and clicks, then going all in on efforts to catalogue Trump as a threat to the country (also a great source of ratings and clicks).

No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate. The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers. For Trump, the press’s pursuit of the Russia story convinced him that any sort of normal relationship with the press was impossible.

For the past year and a half, CJR has been examining the American media’s coverage of Trump and Russia in granular detail, and what it means as the country enters a new political cycle. Investigative reporter Jeff Gerth interviewed dozens of people at the center of the story—editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit.

The result is an encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history. Gerth’s findings aren’t always flattering, either for the press or for Trump and his team. Doubtless they’ll be debated and maybe even used as ammunition in the ongoing media war being waged in the country. But they are important, and worthy of deep reflection as the campaign for the presidency is about, once again, to begin.

Jeff Gerth is a freelance journalist who spent three decades as an investigative reporter at the New York Times.

The press versus the president, part one

<p>INTRODUCTION: ‘I realized early on I had two jobs’ The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no. “Holy shirt, Bob Mueller is not going...

www.cjr.org

 

[SaintForLife]

 

[SaintForLife]

The article has 4 parts and does a great job of going over many important details.

 

[SaintForLife]

It doesn't get anymore mainstream than the Columbia Journalism Review and Jeff Gerth is a classic liberal reporter. There is so much to dig into in the article.

One of the first things that stood out to me is almost everyone he mentioned in his article refused to even comment on their issues. It's not surprising that they would all ignore an article that exposes them, but it is ironic that they would all hide from the truth.

 

[SaintForLife]

From part one of the article:

Three days before Trump’s presidential announcement, Hillary Clinton entered the race, and it was she, not Trump, who began her campaign facing scrutiny over Russia ties. Weeks earlier, the Times had collaborated with the conservative author of a best-selling book to explore various Clinton-Russia links, including a lucrative speech in Moscow by Bill Clinton, Russia-related donations to the Clinton family foundation, and Russia-friendly initiatives by the Obama administration while Hillary was secretary of state. The Times itself said it had an “exclusive agreement” with the author to “pursue the story lines found in the book” through “its own reporting.” An internal Clinton campaign poll, shared within the campaign the day of Trump’s announcement, showed that the Russia entanglements exposed in the book and the Times were the most worrisome “Clinton negative message,” according to campaign records. Robert Trout, Clinton’s campaign lawyer, declined to comment on the record after an exchange of emails.

By 2016, as Trump’s political viability grew and he voiced admiration for Russia’s “strong leader,” Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and publicly promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia. The media would eventually play a role in all that, but at the outset, reporters viewed Trump and his candidacy as a sideshow. Maggie Haberman of the Times, a longtime Trump chronicler, burst into a boisterous laugh when a fellow panelist on a television news show suggested Trump might succeed at the polls.

I remember the constant discussion or references to Trump changing the GOP platform so it was more Russia friendly. That was a lie:

By July, Trump was poised to become the GOP nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. On July 18, the first day of the gathering, Josh Rogin, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece about the party’s platform position on Ukraine under the headline “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” The story would turn out to be an overreach. Subsequent investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine-related actions, if warranted, and calling for “additional assistance” for Ukraine. What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama administration hadn’t done.

...The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”

Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later.

The famous line from Trump about Russia finding Clinton's emails that the Russiagaters still point to as proof of collusion:

Trump, unaware of any plan to tie him to the Kremlin, pumped life into the sputtering Russia narrative. Asked about the DNC hacks by reporters at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort on July 27, he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” The quip was picked up everywhere. Clinton national-security aide Jake Sullivan quickly seized on the remarks, calling them “a national-security issue.” The comment became a major exhibit over the next several years for those who believed Trump had an untoward relationship with Russia. Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began to fade into the background.

Hope Hicks, Trump’s press aide, later testified to Congress that she told Trump some in the media were taking his statement “quite literally” but that she believed it was “a joke.”

I asked Trump what he meant. “If you look at the whole tape,” he said in an interview, “it is obvious that it was being said sarcastically,” a point he made at the time.

I reviewed the tape. After several minutes of repeated questions about Russia, Trump’s facial demeanor evolved, to what seemed like his TV entertainer mode; that’s when, in response to a final Russia question, he said the widely quoted words. Then, appearing to be playful, he said the leakers “would probably be rewarded mightily by the press” if they found Clinton’s long-lost emails, because they contained “some beauties.” Trump, after talking with Hicks that day in Florida, sought to control the damage by tweeting that whoever had Clinton’s deleted emails “should share them with the FBI.”

That didn’t mute the response. Sullivan immediately jumped in, saying the remarks at Doral encouraged “espionage.”

The press versus the president, part one

<p>INTRODUCTION: ‘I realized early on I had two jobs’ The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no. “Holy shirt, Bob Mueller is not going...

www.cjr.org

 

[bdb13]

Have started reading part 1, are there not citations available? Multiple times already have wanted to delve further into something but looks like I'd have to do the legwork myself.

 

[MT15]

A simple lookup of this author shows a mixed bag. He did win a group Pulitzer while at The NY Times, but has been criticized for omitting facts that don’t support his crusade. His Whitewater articles misrepresented the facts of the case in a material manner.

“Gerth's reporting was criticized by liberal columnist Gene Lyons for "not particularly fair or balanced stories that combine a prosecutorial bias and the art of tactical omission."[4] Other criticisms centered on the unclear time line - it was difficult to pick out that Bill Clinton was Attorney General, not Governor, at the time the partnership was created, and that Jim McDougal did not own a business regulated by the state until passage of the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act in 1982, 4 years after creation of the partnership. (See The Hunting of the President, particularly the book.)[5]”

He also wrote a story alleging a man sold nuclear secrets to China, which the FBI used and got the man arrested, and the judge ended up apologizing profusely to the man for his incarceration because the charges turned out to be baseless.

Similarly, Gerth was sued by a resort for an article that appeared in Penthouse which alleged it was involved in organized crime. He settled before trial and publicly apologized for the article.

He has also written a book on Hillary Clinton, and I think it’s at least possible he may be biased against the Clintons (he’s not a journalism graduate and worked on the McGovern campaign).

So, finding him pinning everything on Clinton is pretty much on brand. This is the kind of information that’s helpful as you read something from an author you know nothing about.

 

[MT15]

Have started reading part 1, are there not citations available? Multiple times already have wanted to delve further into something but looks like I'd have to do the legwork myself.

Not linking to source material is a huge red flag. Are you sure it’s not footnoted or something?

 

[bdb13]

Not linking to source material is a huge red flag. Are you sure it’s not footnoted or something?

Yeah, I don't see any. Certainly would be better if there were citations with the background info more readily available.

 

[SaintForLife]

A simple lookup of this author shows a mixed bag. He did win a group Pulitzer while at The NY Times, but has been criticized for omitting facts that don’t support his crusade. His Whitewater articles misrepresented the facts of the case in a material manner.

“Gerth's reporting was criticized by liberal columnist Gene Lyons for "not particularly fair or balanced stories that combine a prosecutorial bias and the art of tactical omission."[4] Other criticisms centered on the unclear time line - it was difficult to pick out that Bill Clinton was Attorney General, not Governor, at the time the partnership was created, and that Jim McDougal did not own a business regulated by the state until passage of the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act in 1982, 4 years after creation of the partnership. (See The Hunting of the President, particularly the book.)[5]”

He also wrote a story alleging a man sold nuclear secrets to China, which the FBI used and got the man arrested, and the judge ended up apologizing profusely to the man for his incarceration because the charges turned out to be baseless.

Similarly, Gerth was sued by a resort for an article that appeared in Penthouse which alleged it was involved in organized crime. He settled before trial and publicly apologized for the article.

He has also written a book on Hillary Clinton, and I think it’s at least possible he may be biased against the Clintons (he’s not a journalism graduate and worked on the McGovern campaign).

So, finding him pinning everything on Clinton is pretty much on brand. This is the kind of information that’s helpful as you read something from an author you know nothing about.

The article comes from an excellent source in The Columbia Journalism Review and yet you resort to your usual shtick of trying to discredit the source. You don't show anything that's incorrect in the article.

You are one of the biggest water carriers for the Democratic Party that I've seen on any message board. It's so bad that one might suspect you of being some kind of Democratic operative. I'm half joking, but even in the face of the most exhaustive article from an excellent mainstream source you keep your head in the sand. Its amazing especially considering the sources you post like Frum, Rupert, Filipkowski, Rubin, Krystol etc.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

Columbia Journalism Review's big fail: It published 24,000 words on Russiagate and missed the point

The magazine's attempted takedown of the media's coverage bolsters Trump's phony narrative.

www.motherjones.com

Gerth finds plenty of ammo for his assault on the media. But here’s where he goes wrong: He misrepresents the scandal that is the subject of the media coverage he is scrutinizing. He defines the Trump-Russia affair by only two elements of the tale: the question of Trump collusion with Moscow and the unconfirmed Steele dossier. This is exactly how Trump and his lieutenants want the scandal to be perceived. From the start, Trump has proclaimed “no collusion,” setting that as the bar for judging him. That is, no evidence of criminal collusion, and he’s scot-free. And he and his defenders have fixated on the Steele dossier—often falsely claiming it triggered the FBI’s investigation—to portray Trump as the victim of untrue allegations and “fake news.” Gerth essentially accepts these terms of the debate.

Yet the focus on collusion and the Steele material has been a purposeful distraction meant to obscure the basics of the scandal: Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win, and Trump and his aides aided and abetted this assault on American democracy by denying such an attack was happening. Trump provided cover for a foreign adversary subverting a US election. Throughout the thousands and thousands of words Gerth generates, he downplays or ignores these fundamentals and how the media in 2016 covered them (which was shoddily). Instead, he zeroes in on the reporting related to collusion and Steele. In doing so, he offers an examination predicated on a skewed view of reality.

Gerth sets off a worrying signal in the fifth paragraph of this opus, when he writes that there was “an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.” Hyperbolic version of the truth? What does that mean? Gerth does acknowledge that the Washington Post “has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements,” but to cast Trump’s lies as “hyperbolic” truth—as if there are two morally equivalent sides here—indicates this analysis is not going to fare well. (Trump, of course, lied repeatedly about his doings in Russia.)

Throughout the four parts, Gerth lowballs the Russian attack on the election and Trump’s assistance. He quotes academic studies that conclude the secret Russian campaign to exploit social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube—to influence the election did not have a significant measurable impact. Yet he barely mentions the Russian hacking operation that led to WikiLeaks releasing daily derogatory material about Hillary Clinton in the final month of the campaign—including a trove of stolen documents dumped on the day the Washington Post revealed Trump’s Access Hollywood comments. (That move appeared to be a naked attempt to distract from Trump’s “grab ’em by the arse” remark.) This is where Moscow undoubtedly got its biggest bang, producing weeks of negative stories that prevented the Clinton campaign from advancing its own messaging. The American political press eagerly lapped up these tidbits without highlighting the larger story that the scoops were the results of Russian information warfare mounted to shape the election. In a race as close as 2016, those weeks of bad press were likely one of several decisive factors that determined the outcome.

 

[MT15]

The article comes from an excellent source in The Columbia Journalism Review and yet you resort to your usual shtick of trying to discredit the source. You don't show anything that's incorrect in the article.

You are one of the biggest water carriers for the Democratic Party that I've seen on any message board. It's so bad that one might suspect you of being some kind of Democratic operative. I'm half joking, but even in the face of the most exhaustive article from an excellent mainstream source you keep your head in the sand. Its amazing especially considering the sources you post like Frum, Rupert, Filipkowski, Rubin, Krystol etc.

I only reported facts about the author. As you can see, he has a very checkered history - a real problem with several of his projects.

All of your post is actually just a personal attack on me, and not any sort of defense of this article. I was very careful to post only facts from this author’s life. I told you I don’t have the inclination to spend the time to read the article. I don’t know anything about the Columbia Journalism Review. So that fact means nothing to me.

When you see something that affirms what you want to believe, don’t just believe it without doing some critical thinking about it. And a five minute search on the author’s name turns up some red flags about him. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, necessarily, but he merits a bit more skepticism once you know his history. Then when you add in the lack of links to original source material, and the narrative that runs counter to what the rest of the world knows to be true - well, alarm bells should be sounding.

 

[SystemShock]

Anyone has the Cliff notes? What's the point of all of that? The usual "MSM bad/unfair to "conservatives" "?

 

[MT15]

Anyone has the Cliff notes? What's the point of all of that? The usual "MSM bad/unfair to "conservatives" "?

Wno knows, but the message seems to be that the Clintons are responsible for every bad thing that ever happened to Donald Trump. Which is LOL on its face, but here we are.

 

[samiam5211]

Coverage of Trump wasn't negative enough.

The media and deep state should have never let him take office.

 

[SaintForLife]

Anyone has the Cliff notes? What's the point of all of that? The usual "MSM bad/unfair to "conservatives" "?

Considering all the lies and the behavior of the Media, Democrats and the FBI during Russiagate, isn't it a good thing to have a legitimate source show what they did?

 

[SaintForLife]

Columbia Journalism Review's big fail: It published 24,000 words on Russiagate and missed the point

The magazine's attempted takedown of the media's coverage bolsters Trump's phony narrative.

www.motherjones.com

Gerth finds plenty of ammo for his assault on the media. But here’s where he goes wrong: He misrepresents the scandal that is the subject of the media coverage he is scrutinizing. He defines the Trump-Russia affair by only two elements of the tale: the question of Trump collusion with Moscow and the unconfirmed Steele dossier. This is exactly how Trump and his lieutenants want the scandal to be perceived. From the start, Trump has proclaimed “no collusion,” setting that as the bar for judging him. That is, no evidence of criminal collusion, and he’s scot-free. And he and his defenders have fixated on the Steele dossier—often falsely claiming it triggered the FBI’s investigation—to portray Trump as the victim of untrue allegations and “fake news.” Gerth essentially accepts these terms of the debate.

Yet the focus on collusion and the Steele material has been a purposeful distraction meant to obscure the basics of the scandal: Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win, and Trump and his aides aided and abetted this assault on American democracy by denying such an attack was happening. Trump provided cover for a foreign adversary subverting a US election. Throughout the thousands and thousands of words Gerth generates, he downplays or ignores these fundamentals and how the media in 2016 covered them (which was shoddily). Instead, he zeroes in on the reporting related to collusion and Steele. In doing so, he offers an examination predicated on a skewed view of reality.

Gerth sets off a worrying signal in the fifth paragraph of this opus, when he writes that there was “an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.” Hyperbolic version of the truth? What does that mean? Gerth does acknowledge that the Washington Post “has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements,” but to cast Trump’s lies as “hyperbolic” truth—as if there are two morally equivalent sides here—indicates this analysis is not going to fare well. (Trump, of course, lied repeatedly about his doings in Russia.)

Throughout the four parts, Gerth lowballs the Russian attack on the election and Trump’s assistance. He quotes academic studies that conclude the secret Russian campaign to exploit social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube—to influence the election did not have a significant measurable impact. Yet he barely mentions the Russian hacking operation that led to WikiLeaks releasing daily derogatory material about Hillary Clinton in the final month of the campaign—including a trove of stolen documents dumped on the day the Washington Post revealed Trump’s Access Hollywood comments. (That move appeared to be a naked attempt to distract from Trump’s “grab ’em by the arse” remark.) This is where Moscow undoubtedly got its biggest bang, producing weeks of negative stories that prevented the Clinton campaign from advancing its own messaging. The American political press eagerly lapped up these tidbits without highlighting the larger story that the scoops were the results of Russian information warfare mounted to shape the election. In a race as close as 2016, those weeks of bad press were likely one of several decisive factors that determined the outcome.

You cant be serious. You are posting an article from the guy who was the first reporter pushing the BS Steele dossier?

Are you not aware that the Steele Dossier was complete BS and one of the sources was long time Clinton Operative Charles Dolan?

‘The Steele Dossier Was a Case Study in How Reporters Get Manipulated’

There is a shady underworld of spies for hire whose objective is to spin the information received by the American public. Usually, it works.

nymag.com

Check out the correction on this article:

 

[SystemShock]

Considering all the lies and the behavior of the Media, Democrats and the FBI during Russiagate, isn't it a good thing to have a legitimate source show what they did?