The Mueller Blame Game Begins
|
|
“Nobody wants to hear this,” writes Matt Taibbi, “but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”
And so it’s gone since Attorney General William Barr announced that Robert Mueller had failed to find evidence that President Trump colluded with Russia. When Barr’s verdict was released last Sunday you could almost hear a collective gasp, followed by an all-out riot of blame in the media.
This week of panic, outrage and blame-gaming was reminiscent of the days following Donald Trumps’ victory in November 2016. Now, as then, it did not take Trump to ignite the criticism (though he gleefully poured gasoline on the fire). The finger-pointing commenced within the media itself.
“The media coverage of the Russia investigation was abysmal and self-discrediting — obsessive and hysterical, often suggesting that the smoking gun was right around the corner, sometimes supporting its hoped-for result with erroneous, too-good-to-check reporting,”
wrote
Rich Lowery in the
National Review
. “Never has so little come of so many screaming chyrons.”
Column after column by conservative pundits cited quotations from liberal commentators that proved embarrassingly erroneous (
“The walls are closing in,”
CNN's Don Lemon predicted).
The New York Post
took the trend to the point of (brilliant) caricature by sponsoring a “Mueller March Madness” competition for the most wrongheaded predictions
(
Rachel Maddow won by a landslide)
.
But it was journalists on the left who were most critical of their own team, as if the only honorable response to Barr’s announcement was a public flogging.
The decision “lands like a rotten egg on a political and media establishment that had gone all-in on its own self-serving — and wrong — theory of the case,” wrote
The Times’
Farhad Manjoo.
Taibbi’s autopsy of the media’s failure – documented in devastating detail - was the most talked-about piece. “There was never real gray area here,” he wrote. “Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included.”
Margaret Sullivan of the
Washington Post
was left to remind the world of the remarkable investigative reporting the media has produced over the past two years. “It should be no surprise that (Trump’s) media echo chamber — led by Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity — is calling for the heads of journalists whose work Hannity couldn’t begin to emulate even if given 100 years,” she wrote.
The irony of all this is that, once again, the media is rushing to judgement. Missing from the high-decibel debate is a recognition that the Mueller report
hasn’t been released yet
. The recriminations have been based on a four-page letter from a Trump appointee, not the 300-page findings of the special counsel.
As Matt Taibbi might say (actually, he did say it), “we broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.”
|
|
Springtime for the Lobbyist
|
|
When last we saw Todd Howe, a former D.C. lobbyist and adviser to Andrew Cuomo, he was the star witness in the corruption trial last year of Joseph Percoco, the governor’s former top aide. Howe
threw the trial into chaos
when he admitted on the stand that he’d violated his cooperation deal with prosecutors (Percoco was convicted anyway.)
Howe is now awaiting his April 5
th
sentencing for, among other things, embezzling $1.7 million from his former law firm and failing to pay taxes on it. So how’s he doing?
Well, according to the Albany
Times Union,
he’s doing just fine, thank you
, after
trading "the snaking vines of the lobbying network" for the "salt-of-the earth goodness" of Idaho.
The once-powerful lobbyist wrote to the sentencing judge that he now lives in Ketchum, where the paper said he “is working as facilities manager at a winter-summer resort. There, Howe drives a Snowcat, a tractor-like vehicle used to groom ski slopes.”
"I have found it therapeutic living this less complicated life in an environment where salt-of-the earth goodness is what is valued, rather than the pressures and competitiveness of Washington and New York,” he wrote. “Being outdoors every day in the Idaho mountains and working hard physically has itself been extremely helpful to me."
Hard work and fresh air will keep you out of trouble. Got it.
|
|
The Marshall Project’s Unsung Hero
|
|
The Marshall Project, the nonprofit criminal justice site,
this week announced that Susan Chira
, a highly-respected, longtime editor at
The Times,
will replace founding editor Bill Keller, who is retiring.
Chira has been getting kudos left and right since her appointment. But we also direct your attention to one of TMP’s lesser-known lights, a fellow
e-blaster named Andrew Cohen, who bangs out the daily
Opening Statement
and
recently turned in his 1,000
th
edition. Cohen, who is both a lawyer and a writer, is probably read more than any other journalist on the site.
“I start around 3 a.m. Mountain Time and usually get a draft filed by 6 p.m.” he told us from his home in Denver (we feel his pain). “The perfect OS is a blend of hard news and feature stories, commentary from different ideological viewpoints, and stories from smaller media organizations that deserve more attention than they might otherwise receive.”
He's got a lot of grateful readers out there.
|
|
Here and There
Comings and Goings in Media and Communications
|
Jillian Jorgensen
joins New York 1 as education reporter from
The Daily News
, where she was City Hall bureau chief...
David Uberti
, who recently wrote about
the coming digital media "meltdown"
in the Columbia Journalism Review, joins
Vice News
as media reporter
...
John Cook
, who managed to do some strong journalism at
Gawker
back in the day, joins
Business Insider
as investigations editor..
Hazel Crampton-Hays
joins the New York City Comptroller’s Office as press secretary; she used to work for Andrew Cuomo...
Sopan Deb
and
David Chen
, reporters in the Culture and Metro sections of
The Times
, respectively, move to the sports department.
|
|
"We know now that under our shambolic democracy, a man as unfit as Mr. Trump really can legitimately acquire all the terrifying powers of the presidency without being controlled by a foreign puppet master."
Farhad Manjoo in The Times.
|
|
Have a career announcement for Here and There? A Quotable quote?
|
|
Kirtzman Strategies is a strategic communications and public affairs firm that works with public officials, nonprofits, companies, tech startups and education organizations.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
