Opinion: What the Mueller report reveals about the media
By Erik Wemple Erik Wemple Media critic with a focus on the ups and downs and downs of the cable-news industry. Email Bio Follow Media critic May 13 at 3:20 PM This is the first of two posts examining the media dimensions of the Mueller report.
The article in question may well have been this one, by New York Times reporter David E. Sanger: “Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking.” It details the expulsion of 35 “suspected Russian intelligence operatives” and the closure of two properties allegedly used for Russian intelligence purposes. The nitty-gritty of those moves mattered a great deal to Flynn, who handled Russia matters during the presidential transition.
Why would the Mueller report note a CNN chyron? Because Trump watches a lot of cable news, and the Mueller team was trying to capture his reactions to news events in the section on obstruction of justice — where the intent behind the president’s various misdeeds is a critical legal consideration. The report makes this point explicit:
Not long after that story broke, Trump challenged it. “Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story,” he said while attending an economic conference in Davos, Switzerland. One section of the Mueller report said that"the president publicly disputed these accounts, and privately told McGahn that he had simply wanted McGahn to bring conflicts of interest to the Department of Justice’s attention.” Such denialism lives to the present day, in fact.
The Post and the New York Times dominate the mentions in the Mueller report, accounting for about 100 of the 260-odd media citations. The bylines on the credited stories explain the ubiquity of these two outlets: They have strong staffing both at the White House and on the national security/federal law enforcement front, the very nexus of most of the scoops regarding the Trump-Mueller clash.
Where’s Fox News? With about $2.7 billion in operating revenue, Fox News is equipped to invest in investigative journalism, immersion journalism, breaking-news journalism — every sort of journalism. That sentiment was by no means a conceptual scoop. Following the release of Barr’s letter delivering the top-line findings of the Mueller report — Barr claims it wasn’t a “summary” — Federalist co-founder Sean Davis wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story, from its birth during the presidential campaign to its final breath Sunday — and they never stopped congratulating themselves for it.
Perhaps Horowitz’s report will draw on the work of Chuck Ross, a Daily Caller reporter who took it upon himself to vet the Steele dossier and its origin story, among other Russia-Trump strands. In contrast to all the opinionators in his media niche, Ross mined sources and court documents to chip away at this carefully circumscribed beat. “There are lots of parts of investigation that you would have missed or gotten late if you hadn’t been reading Chuck Ross,” says Wheeler.
In January 2017, Ross highlighted the denial of Guccifer 2.0 that it was tied to Russian hacking of Democratic entities. The story contained a disclosure that the"hackers also provided exclusives of hacked documents to reporters, including to The Daily Caller.” After the Daily Beast in March 2018 reported that Guccifer 2.0 was, in fact, a Russian intelligence officer, critics pressed Ross for details, prompting this tweeted reply: “everybody. Guccifer 2.0 and his buddies Guccifer 3.
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