Forget the soul-searching. The media counterattack is underway.
With harsh criticism coming from the left as well as the right as Robert Mueller’s probe ends, the leaders of major news organizations, along with assorted pundits, are defending their work and that of their colleagues.
And most of them aren’t giving an inch.
Nope, they’re basically saying we did everything right.
They’re not reflecting on whether they banged the drum so loudly that it sounded like Donald Trump’s presidency was headed toward collapse. They’re not addressing whether they raised expectations for the probe to an absurd degree. They’re not discussing whether reporting bled into commentary as more of its practitioners simultaneously joined the cable news parade.
The New York Times reached several of the news chiefs.
CNN President Jeff Zucker is “entirely comfortable” with the network’s handling of the story:
“We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did. A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”
Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron: “The special counsel investigation documented, as we reported, extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and widespread deceit on the part of certain advisers to the president about Russian contacts and other matters. Our job is to bring facts to light. Others make determinations about prosecutable criminal offenses.”
And Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor: “We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.”
Joe Scarborough offered a high-decibel defense the coverage on his MSNBC show: “Don’t knock reporters for The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the broadcast networks for doing their job right.” He also took several shots at Fox opinion hosts.
Overall, I think there’s something of a straw-man argument here.
Of course a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, which yielded 37 indictments, and led to convictions of top former Trump associates, needed to be covered extensively and aggressively.
Of course the fact that Mueller declined to bring further charges doesn’t mean that all the stories written about the allegations and Trump’s handling of them — not to mention his constant attacks on the special counsel — were wrong.
And of course politicians can behave unethically without explicitly violating the law.
So the issue isn’t coverage vs. no coverage. It’s proportionate coverage vs. Defcon 1 coverage, the drumbeat of here’s-the-latest-outrage that could sink the president vs. here-are-the-latest-developments and new questions raised by our reporting.
While “journalists aren’t investigators” in the law-enforcement sense, they routinely submit their investigative work for prizes, and promote it as “a New York Times/Washington Post/CNN investigation has found …”
And that’s without getting into the obliterated line between reporting, analysis and cable punditry in an era when most of the reporters covering the story have TV contracts. And that’s without getting into commentary that portrayed the president as a potential traitor orchestrating a coverup that could lead to impeachment.