OPINION
Top 10 things the media got wrong about ‘collusion’ and ‘obstruction’
By Sohrab Ahmari
April 19, 2019 | 10:01pm | Updated
The prestige press has some explaining to do — for subjecting the nation to a long, cruel ordeal named “collusion” and “obstruction.” Almost two years and millions of column inches later, special counsel Robert Mueller has revealed the theory that President Trump and his campaign conspired with Russia has been just that.
All that remains of collusion and obstruction is the media’s shattered credibility.
The errant reporters and pundits — the ones who peddled the most outrageous falsehoods — want nothing more than to move on. But not so fast: There has to be some accountability for the biggest foul-ups.
Here are the 10 worst, drawn from among many more:
10. CNN bungles Comey testimony
Jake Tapper
Getty Images
It took four bylines — including those of CNN stars Jake Tapper and Gloria Borger — to completely botch the most important aspect of former FBI Director James Comey’s June 2017 congressional testimony. Comey, per CNN, would dispute Trump’s claim that Comey told him that he (the president) isn’t under investigation. Oops! Turns out Comey didn’t, in fact, dispute Trump’s position, and Tapper & Co. had to run a correction walking back their big scoop.
9. Times columnist shares fervid dreams
Charles Blow
Getty Images
New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s column of Dec. 2, 2018, was silly even by his standards. “Members of Trump’s team were extremely interested in and eager to accept any assistance that the Russians could provide,” wrote Blow. “That is clear.” Actually, it isn’t clear. Mueller’s investigators “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” said the report. Expect Blow to fail upward.
8. Washington Post ‘fact checker’ needs a fact check
“All the Known Times the Trump Campaign Met With Russians” read the headline on a 2017 Fact Checker feature in The Washington Post. But by fact-checking, the paper really means judging various claims against liberal orthodoxies. Case in point: The claim in question was Trump’s protest that “Russia” is “fake news to try to make up for the loss of the Democrats.” The Washington Post judged that to be “false.” The Mueller report suggests otherwise.
7. The MSNBC spy who should stay in the cold
No senior US official has done more damage to the credibility of the intelligence community than John Brennan. For months leading to the Mueller report, the former CIA director offered a steady stream of collusion drivel on MSNBC. Last month, Brennan confidently predicted that “Friday [March 8] is the day the grand-jury indictments come down” against Trump associates and family members over “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians and US persons.” Nope.
6. The Guardian concocts a collusion meeting
Luke Harding
Getty Images
Among foreign outlets, none covered itself in as much shame as The Guardian. The British paper in November 2018 published a story — bylined to superstar writer Luke Harding and two others, one of whom later mysteriously disappeared from the paper’s Web site — about secret talks between one Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange that took place at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The sourcing was flimsy, to put it generously, and sure enough, as Glenn Greenwald notes at The Intercept, “Nothing in the [Mueller] report even hints, let alone states, that [Manafort] ever visited Julian Assange.”
5. WaPo columnist’s false, undying Ukraine narrative
“The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes” ahead of the Republican National Convention “to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.” So reported The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. Soon the story — of craven Trump campaign officials beholden to Moscow and determined to backstab Kiev — took on a life of its own. But it was false. As Mueller’s report notes, the change to an amendment to the GOP platform wasn’t “undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia.” (Side note: Trump authorized arms sales to Ukraine, something his predecessor refused to do.)
4. The Atlantic accuses Jeff Sessions!
In June 2017, the combustible young reporter Julia Ioffe wrote an article for The Atlantic, running to several thousand words, that cast doubt on former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ claim that he didn’t meet with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as a Trump surrogate but rather as a matter of routine in his role at the time as a US senator. The Sessions-Kislyak meeting, Ioffe suggested, amounted to yet more shady Russian influence on the Trump camp. Chalk Ioffe’s reportorial credibility as another casualty of the Mueller report, which noted that the meeting in question didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.”
3. David Corn’s dossier debacle
It was the document that set off the whole shebang. In October 2016, days before the election, David Corn of Mother Jones wrote of an unnamed “former senior intelligence officer for a Western country,” Christopher Steele (unnamed at the time), who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Trump they could use to blackmail him. Thus were born the infamous “Steele dossier” and endless late-night jokes about a Trump “pee-pee” tape. But the Mueller report barely touches on the dossier — and confirms none of its outlandish claims.
2. McClatchy catches Michael Cohen in Prague
Speaking of the dossier, remember when McClatchy’s Greg Gordon and Peter Stone reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump consigliere Michael Cohen had “secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign,” supposedly to meet his dastardly Russian handlers? If this one easily verifiable claim could be verified, the McClatchy reporters said (and perhaps secretly hoped), so could the rest of the dossier! Here’s Mueller’s report on that matter: “Cohen had never traveled to Prague.” What’s Czech for “egg on your face”?
1. Buzzfeed knows who told Cohen to lie
Ben Smith
Getty Images
Which brings us to the top foul-up of the whole sordid saga. That would be BuzzFeed’s report, by Jason Lepold and Anthony Cormier, in January claiming that Trump had directed Cohen to lie to Congress about talks to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Well, here’s the Mueller report on that count: “The president did not direct [Cohen] to provide false testimony. Cohen also said he did not tell the president about his planned testimony.” Ouch.
So surely BuzzFeed has now offered a straightforward correction and apology, right? Think again. Instead, Editor in Chief Ben Smith published a convoluted self-defense, only begrudgingly admitting that “Mueller has the last word.”
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READ MORE: https://nypost.com/2019/04/19/top-10-things-the-media-got-wrong-about-collusion-and-obstruction/
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