Real Journalism in an Anti-Journalism Age
In 2019, Donald Trump’s Justice Department appointed John Durham to investigate the FBI’s inquiry into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia in advance of the 2016 presidential election. Durham, later promoted to special counsel by Attorney General Bill Barr to protect his investigation under President Biden, was granted access to likely hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to Trump’s communication with Russian operatives, the federal government’s interactions with Russia, and the FBI’s investigation thereof. Like the Mueller investigation before it, Durham’s report was years in the making, involving hundreds of interviews, and culminated largely in disappointment—the special counsel indicted only three FBI agents, two of whom were acquitted. Unlike Mueller’s investigation, however, the Durham report was not a major news story. It was not anxiously anticipated in Congress or on social media. The Washington Post did not rush a copy of it onto the shelves of Barnes & Noble.
While Durham’s investigation of the FBI’s misconduct was ongoing, another long-brewing attempt at post-2016 accountability was also underway. Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter, was crafting a postmortem on the media’s misconduct in its coverage of the so-called Russiagate story, which began with a statement of suspicion by Senator Diane Feinstein and Congressman Adam Schiff in September 2016 and accelerated fatefully with the publication of the infamous Steele Dossier. Gerth’s findings were published in the Columbia Journalism Review—a respected journalism watchdog—on January 30 of this year, and headlined “The Press Versus the President.” The report is 24,000 words long and composed of four distinct parts. In his Editor’s Note, Kyle Pope calls it “an encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history.”
Gerth began his career investigating Watergate; later collaborations with legendary reporter Seymour Hersh led to his hiring by the Times in 1976 where, among other investigations, he reported on early episodes in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the U.S government-approved sale of sensitive technology to China. This latter work earned the Times its 1999 Pulitzer for National Reporting, with Gerth recognized as the primary contributor. He left the Times in 2005 and two years later published “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” an investigative biography.
Gerth began investigating the media’s treatment of the Trump-Russia story in 2021, but he published it in a world much changed over the course of two short years. Trump was out of office, and Russia had invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. While Gerth’s report had little to do with foreign policy per se, the invasion immediately supercharged American sentiment regarding Vladimir Putin. If in 2021 Russians were seen as mere anti-Democratic election-meddlers and human rights abusers, they were now imperial fascists, and any discourse that even slightly softened the degree of their malice was seen as apologia. This was evident not only in the response to Gerth’s report but also in the continued ignoring of experts like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, whose interpretation of the Russian invasion differs from the mainstream orthodoxy but is not given much attention for fear that it lends support to Putin’s war effort.
In fact, “The Press Versus the President” does not acquit Putin, and it often gives explicit credence to claims that the Russians were attempting to meddle in the election. But as its title makes clear, the series offers a thorough account of the many ways in which mainstream corporate media outlets (the Times and the Washington Post get particular attention) operated hastily and sloppily in their coverage of the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian state operatives, and it highlights many specific instances in which editors and newsrooms elided nuanced fact in favor of the congealing narrative that Trump and his team had made deliberate attempts to conspire with Russia and secure the presidency. The report says little about what Russians did or did not do (as is true of Durham’s report, as well), focusing instead on the reasons why many news outlets owe the American people an apology for their role in stoking a false panic over deliberate collusion. Bob Woodward, no friend to Trump, put it best in a conversation with Gerth, quoted in part one: newsrooms need to “walk down the painful road of introspection.”
Gerth’s four-part retrospective is exhaustive and granular. One throughline is the presence of Peter Strzok, who led the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Strzok appears throughout the series—mostly in the form of since-published text exchanges but also in an interview with Gerth—as regularly infuriated by the inaccuracies of specific Times Trump-Russia stories; “no substance and largely wrong,” “the press is going to undermine its credibility,” and, most famously, “There’s no there there.” The FBI was in regular communication with the Times about the Russia investigation, and Strzok’s private texts were made public by Rod Rosenstein in January of 2020; one of Gerth’s strongest claims in the report is that the mainstream media made deliberate efforts to avoid publishing Strzok’s comments or to use him as a source.
Gerth has said that he sees the Trump-Russia moment in journalism as analogous to the war in Iraq. Memorably, the New York Times published what amounted to an apology in 2004 for its coverage of Iraq leading up to the invasion, citing numerous instances in which its claims about Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda had not been independently verified or rigorously vetted. Nearly two decades later, it is uncontroversial to remember that this carelessness misled perhaps millions of readers to support a war they wouldn’t have otherwise. In “The Press Versus the President,” Gerth has detailed dozens of similarly egregious mistakes.
With “The Press Versus the President,” Gerth joins a cohort of former establishment journalists who now work as freelancers and who publish work that often counters the top-line dogmas of the papers for whom they once helped win Pulitzers. Nicholas Wade, former Times science writer, is now one of the most outspoken critics of the mainstream media’s dismissal of the lab-leak theory of Covid origin. Seymour Hersh, a former colleague of Gerth’s and the most controversial figure in this group, published a bombshell report on Substack in February, claiming that the U.S., not Russia—as was being speculated by the Times and others at the time—was responsible for the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline bombing. Wade’s work stands in stark opposition to the Times’s lab-leak coverage since the Spring of 2020. (Apoorva Mandavilli, current Times science reporter, has called the lab-leak theory “racist,” and Julian E. Barnes downplayed the theory as recently as February of this year, even after the FBI and Department of Energy endorsed it as the most plausible explanation for Covid’s emergence). Even today, and despite mounting evidence, you are unlikely to find discussion of these anti-consensus views in the mainstream media, liberal or conservative.
What these reporters share beyond their former employer is a preoccupation with two of the most contentious topics in American politics: Russia and Covid. The hostile reception their work has received shows how tolerance for journalistic independence has eroded. Wade was called a racist in Congress and nearly barred from testifying on the lab-leak theory; Hersh has been regularly derided as a Putin stooge. Vox calls Gerth a Russiagate “revisionist” in a piece that concedes many of his major points but goes on to say that he is wrong for calling Russiagate in its entirety a “hoax”—a claim the reporter has never made. Work that should have inspired reflection on the corrupted relationship between politics and journalism has been glossed over, ignored, or dismissed by the very media outlets most responsible for the loss of public trust in news reporting.
In a climate where partisanship and crude tribalism have compromised our receptivity to truth, Jeff Gerth and others like him are providing a new model of what freedom of the press can mean—and reminding us how vital it remains.
