But in the swirl of reporting and speculation about the 45th president, nothing has held viewers on the edge of their seats quite like the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his investigation into possible ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian agents.
The storyline had it all: Cold War-era intrigue, allegations of shadowy meetings in Moscow and a cast of recurring characters that included an aide in a $15,000 ostrich skin jacket (Paul D. Manafort) and another who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back (Roger Stone).
Mueller’s complete report has not yet been released, but on Sunday, Attorney General William Barr made public a four-page letter to Congress reporting that the 22-month inquiry did not have sufficient evidence to conclude that Trump and his associates “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” before the 2016 election. The news blindsided many liberals — particularly those with an ambient knowledge of Rachel Maddow’s nightly monologues on MSNBC.
Who could blame them? The news media’s coverage of the investigation, particularly on cable TV, caused millions of Americans who disapprove of Trump to put their faith in Mueller. There were even prayer candles, key chains and paintings made in the likeness of the silent 74-year-old Marine veteran, and his fans believed his looming report would bring, in the words of the “Bachelor” creator Mike Fleiss, “the most dramatic finale of a presidency ever!”
When that didn’t happen, Trump and his allies placed blame on the news media for its ravenous coverage. “I think Democrats and the liberal media owe the president and they owe the American people an apology,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on NBC News’ Today.
Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, wrote on Twitter, “The 3 biggest losers from the Mueller report in order — the media, the media, the media.”
It was a bipartisan ripping. Matt Taibbi, a Rolling Stone writer whose book on the 2016 election is titled “Insane Clown President,” is not exactly a fan of Trump. And yet he called the apparent lack of new charges resulting from the special counsel’s investigation “a death blow for the reputation of the American news media.” He compared it to the erroneous reporting on weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said that, by his count, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC had published a combined 8,500 stories on the Russia probe. He specifically pointed to CNN and chyrons that would include the phrase “amid Russia investigation,” no matter what the topic.
“It’s so painfully obvious they wanted it to be true so badly, and the last two years of their lives and two years of their news coverage has been an entire waste,” Gidley said.
Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, said he was “entirely comfortable” with the network’s coverage.
“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,” Zucker said in an email. “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.”
Bill Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, said there seemed to be some confusion about the role of journalists. “Mueller and Barr need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt — do we file charges or don’t we?” he said. “Journalists don’t have that standard.”
In other words, Pulitzer Prize-winning reports of alleged wrongdoing do not need to provide evidence of criminality in order to be factual, newsworthy and relevant to readers.
“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,” said Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. “Our job is to bring facts to light. Others make determinations about prosecutable criminal offenses.”
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, echoed that sentiment. “We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets,” he said. “It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.”
But in the nearly two years of the Russia investigation, there have been several high-profile mea culpas.
ABC News apologized and parted ways with its chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, after an errant report that Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, had been directed by Trump to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. Three seasoned investigative journalists at CNN resigned after the network retracted a report that a close Trump aide had ties to a Russian investment firm. Mueller publicly rebuked a BuzzFeed News account that Trump had instructed his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress. (BuzzFeed News stood by its reporting.)
“It’s pretty clear that a lot of people in the media, particularly on cable news, got ahead of their skis on this,” said Michael Isikoff, a co-author of “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”
Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, defended coverage of the Russian investigation, including the decision to publish a dossier put together by British intelligence officer Christopher Steele full of tantalizing (and unsubstantiated) reports about Russian efforts to blackmail Trump.
“It’s pretty hard to imagine a scenario in which people were aware of its existence but not allowed to see it,” Smith said of the dossier.
The editor also expressed concern that journalism was so often churned — and reduced — through the filter of partisan punditry.
“I think it’s a moment when the public conversation favors partisans who are totally convinced in the rightness of what they’re saying and doesn’t favor reporters who are cautious about what they know and are trying to get things right,” Smith said.
That may be true, but in the current ecosystem of political news, when shoe-leather reporters moonlight as cable news analysts, it can be hard for typical viewers to distinguish the pundits from the press.
Even if more damning findings come out in the full report, Trump has already cast the narrative that he is absolved and that the “fake news” media is to be blamed, said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Mitt Romney.
“You see the president’s most vocal supporters, they’re touting the headlines that the president was exonerated and vindicated and where are the apologies from the media?” he said.
Those apologies aren’t likely to come, as long as the same people who have been trying to erode trust in factual reporting are now ones demanding a reckoning.
“We will hold every fake news media liar member accountable,” Sean Hannity wrote Sunday on Twitter.
Fleiss, the producer, who knew Trump in his “Apprentice” years, said cable news had taken a page from the president’s reality TV playbook in teasing every development in the Russia investigation as if it were the final blow.
“He’s a master exaggerator, been doing it his entire life,” Fleiss said. “The rookies tried to keep up and got burned.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.