“You've been given a great gift, George,” the angel Clarence tells George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” “A chance to see what the world would be like without you.”
Readers of the New York Times have been given a similar gift this week – a chance to see how the paper they revere deceives them. Where the Christmas classic showed the difference one person can make through the contrasting fates of two towns, Bedford Falls and Pottersville, Times readers can see how far their paper has fallen by comparing two recent articles.
The first is a survey of the Trump Russia collusion scandal the Times published on Jan. 26. While ostensibly focusing on the relationship between former Attorney General William P. Barr and the man he appointed to investigate Russiagate wrongdoing, John Durham, its real aim is to rewrite the history of Russiagate to justify the actions taken while minimizing the problems that occurred. This long article is written with such seeming authority that readers who consider the Times the “paper of record” will easily dismiss Russiagate critics as part of the right-wing echo chamber.
The second is a devastating critique of the paper’s years-long Trump-Russia coverage, published on Jan. 30 in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review. Written by Jeff Gerth, a former Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the Times, this four-part series, “The press versus the president,”describes in rich detail how the Times (and the many mainstream news outlets that follow its lead) deliberately misled its readers for years. “At its root,” he writes, “was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.”
Just as the fallen, corrupt state of Pottersville is brought into sharp relief by its comparison with Bedford Falls, the deeply deceptive nature of the Times article is exposed by reading CJR’s analysis. I won’t delve into all of Gerth’s deeply reported insights, but four significant differences between his article and the Times’ stand out.
Russiagate’s Origins
As Gerth details, reams of evidence show that the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was cooked up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the summer of 2016. That July, for example, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on reports of a “proposal from one of her [Hillary Clinton’s] foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” Although Gerth does not reveal why Clinton personally embraced this strategy, it is likely she feared the fallout from the release of damaging emails from her personal server or those stolen from the Democratic National Committee and wanted to turn the fallout of that story back on her opponent.
Whatever the motivation, in the final months of the campaign, Clinton’s team, which included the Washington, D.C., opposition research firm Fusion GPS, vigorously spread the smear. Gerth reports:
Hundreds of emails were exchanged between Fusion employees and reporters for such outlets as ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, the Washington Post, Slate, Reuters, and the Times during the last months of the campaign; they involved sharing of ‘raw’ Trump-related information and hints to contact government and campaign officials to bolster the information’s credibility, according to a federal prosecutor’s court filings in 2022.
Despite this – and much more evidence cited by Gerth and others that has long been in the public record – the Jan. 26 Times article seizes on Brennan’s 2016 language to tell readers that there was “a purported plan by Mrs. Clinton to attack Mr. Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails.” It also tells readers that Durham sought “to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump,” without ever informing readers that this “theory” is now an established fact. Such carefully crafted language is a strategy the Times uses time and again to seemingly address inconvenient facts while minimizing them.
The Steele Dossier
A linchpin of the Russiagate conspiracy theory was the Steele dossier – a series of now debunked memos paid for by the Clinton campaign that claimed Trump and his allies were bought and paid for by the Kremlin. In retrospect it is hard to believe anyone accepted its absurd claims of billion-dollar bribes and peeing Moscow prostitutes, but it fueled media suspicion of Trump and helped jumpstart the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s presidential campaign. The Times ignores this history in its Jan. 26 article, blandly describing the dossier as a “dubious” source.
As it turned out, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent working for Fusion GPS, received most of his most explosive allegations from Igor Danchenko, a Russian living in the U.S. who had worked at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank. Danchenko later admitted that he had not verified the loose talk he passed on to Steele from friends, one of whom he had asked for any “thought, rumor, allegation.”
In its Jan. 26 article, however, the Times minimizes this embarrassing point by telling readers that Danchencko had “told the F.B.I. that the dossier exaggerated the credibility of gossip and speculation.” The next two sentences also work to muddy the reader’s mind about Danchenko’s conduct. “Mr. Durham charged him with lying about two sources. He was acquitted, too.”
The Times fails to tell readers, as Gerth notes, that Danchenko’s revelations and other information discrediting the dossier “prompted the Washington Post to retract large chunks of a 2017 article in November 2021, and to follow with a long review of Steele’s sources and methods. The Wall Street Journal and CNN did similar looks back.” But not the New York Times.
Gerth also notes that after Danchenko’s identity as a prime source of the dossier was revealed in 2020, the Times scored an exclusive interview with Danchenko in which it repeated his discredited rumors while not managing to learn that he’d lied to Steele about identity of one his supposed sources. Nonetheless, the day after the Times article was published, Gerth wrote, “Danchenko and his friends used the piece to help a GoFundMe campaign on his behalf.”
The Mueller Report
In the Times’ telling, the fact that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s determination that the Trump campaign had not colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election is not dispositive. “The reality,” it reports, “was more complex. In fact, the [Mueller] report detailed ‘numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.’”
Links, of course, are not collusion. Bill and Hillary Clinton, like many other muckety-mucks, have many links to Russia – including the $500,000 the former president was paid by a bank connected to Putin for a single speech. The point Mueller tried and failed to find was whether the Trump campaign’s links had morphed into something nefarious.
The Times article also tells readers that the Mueller report “established both how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.”
But much of what Mueller cast as the “sweeping and systematic” Russian effort to influence the election involved alleged Russian hacking of DNC servers – which has never been proved – and social media campaigns. Gerth reports, however, that “Facebook ads that were deemed election-related amounted to $2,930, in a political cycle where billions of dollars were spent. The only reporter to write about that finding was [Paul] Sperry, of Real Clear Investigations.” Another report published early last month also concluded that Russian trolls on Twitter had no measurable effect on the election.”
The Times knows and ignores these facts, using Mueller’s overblown language instead – as it did Brennan’s regarding Clinton’s involvement in framing Trump ‒ to cast the Kremlin as a difference maker. It is hard not to conclude that the newspaper is consciously seeking to deceive its readers.
The Inspector General Report
After Mueller report shot down claims of collusion, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz investigated the FBI’s role in the scandal. In its Jan. 26 article, the Times wrote:
The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light. (Mr. Durham’s team later negotiated a guilty plea by that lawyer.) But the broader findings contradicted Mr. Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Mr. Durham’s inquiry. Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated.
Those statements are woefully incomplete. Missing from that passage is the Times’ own assessment when the Horowitz report was released in 2019 that it was a “scathing critique” of the bureau. Gerth reports that “the IG also found seventeen significant errors and omissions by the FBI in its four applications to a secret court to monitor [Trump advisor Carter] Page, who the bureau [falsely] believed was spying for Russia.”
The Times withholds from its readers other widely known facts that Gerth reports. For example, while Horowitz said the bureau had a proper basis for opening the Trump probe, the IG said this was only because of “the low threshold for predication.” Although Horowitz did not find a smoking gun memo proving political bias, the bureau’s lead investigator on the case, Peter Strzok, had assured a colleague during the campaign that Trump would never become president: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
In an opinion piece written four days after the Times article, David Firestone, a member of the paper’s editorial board, concisely stated the message the Times wants its readers to believe about the bureau’s conduct: “[T]here is no evidence in this case that they willfully tried to smear Mr. Trump and his campaign with false allegations of collusion. They were trying to do their jobs, on which the nation’s security depends.”
If I were making a movie about this sorry episode, I would have an angel named Jeff visit every reader of the New York Times, to show them that they are residing in a journalistic version of Pottersville. He would tell them about the heavy cost we are all paying for this by quoting from the end of Gerth’s brave undertaking:
My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences. … During this time, when the media is under extraordinary attack and widely distrusted, a transparent, unbiased, and accountable media is more needed than ever. It’s one of a journalist’s best tools to distinguish themselves from all the misinformation, gossip, and rumor that proliferates on the Web and then gets legitimized on occasion by politicians of all stripes, including Trump.