news because he’d also allegedly been paying the FBI’s senior counterintelligence agent in New York City Charles McGonigal. The list of potential sponsors ranges from vulture capitalist Paul Singer (when it was meant to benefit the Jeb Bush campaign) to the Hillary Clinton campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who most recently made the U.S. While there is nothing new about selective releases, the degree of deception involved here suggests an effort not to inform, but to hoodwink.Īnd even today, we remain somewhat in the dark about who actually paid for the Steele dossier. Of special interest is the instruction they gave my old boss David Kramer not to share the material with the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Cullison because Cullison, who had spent years in Moscow, would see from the outset it was a fabrication. The whole manner in which the since-debunked Steele dossier was inserted into the media is itself an illustration of the upside-down nature of how the media and key Washington institutions reacted to the salacious report that veteran reporter Bob Woodward called “a pile of garbage.” The research firm Fusion-GPS, headed by two former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters, leveraged its relationships in the Fourth Estate to ensure the shoddy dossier got maximum coverage. Now perhaps it makes more sense why CNN continues to use McCabe as a commentator far beyond his actual expiration date. In this case the government cited the media for its actions.” “It was a twist to the symbiotic relationship between the media and the national-security apparatus usually, reporters use pending government action as a peg for their stories.

Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, then proceeded to coordinate disclosures about the investigation with useful media pegs: Gerth goes on in the second installment to draw a stark and alarming contrast between the established practice of the press covering national security issues to how this changed in the coverage of Russia-gate, specifically James Comey’s actions after telling President Trump “I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.”īefore, of course, he leaked his memo of that conversation. Bob Woodward, of the Post, told me that news coverage of the Russia inquiry “wasn’t handled well” and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.” He urged newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.”” “News outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as forthright in examining their own Trump-Russia coverage, which includes serious flaws. In a four-part review of how the mainstream media covered Trump, Russia and the investigation, he finds plenty that went off the rails of best practice of objective journalism: Yet a prominent voice in the legacy media felt compelled nonetheless to tell the rising generation of journalists something that was actually true.Ĭolumbia Journalism Review Jeff Gerth has taken that mandate to heart. This is six weeks before Robert Mueller testified before Congress, and three years before new ownership at Twitter released the company’s files about shadow-banning dissonant voices. Let’s think back for just a moment to where we were then:ĭonald Trump was still president, and life in America was yet to be upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s response. Speaking to graduates of the school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley in 2019, New York Times podcast The Daily producer Michael Barbaro said the media’s number one responsibility then was to “earn back its credibility.”

The dossier podcast