In running an overwhelming number of stories that focused negatively on Trump, the media exhibited its “selectivity bias.” That is, they made a conscious decision to report on matters that conformed to their ideological sympathies and against those of the president. Then, in the body of those stories, there was a distinct “presentation bias” in which viewers were treated to a slanting of the news intended to emphasize an unfavorable viewpoint. Headlines emphasized the negative. Often the storytelling contained no countervailing information that would otherwise balance the narrative—lies by omission. Stories became agenda driven, not knowledge driven.
When the incomprehensible happened on election day, the media reacted to Trump’s victory by using their lofty perch to try to undo the results—to drive the president from office in a slow-motion coup. The drip-drip of leaks became a flood, with favored reporters receiving information from employees of the FBI, the DOJ, and other insiders who considered themselves members of the Trump “resistance.”
On a daily basis TV and Twitter mocked, ridiculed, and demeaned the president. They proclaimed that he had conspired with Russians by committing acts of lawlessness and perfidy akin to treason. They repeatedly gave a platform to Trump’s political enemies and made little effort to hold them accountable for the condemnation they so freely disgorged on air.
After a Trump speech in August 2017, former DNI Clapper spouted off about Trump’s “fitness to be in this office”—a lot of nerve for someone who should have been indicted for criminal perjury.40 In 2013, while testifying before Congress, Clapper was asked, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” The DNI responded, “No, sir . . . not wittingly.”
When the story broke soon thereafter that the NSA had been doing exactly that, Clapper first claimed he hadn’t realized what the question was about. Then he told a reporter who called him on the lie, “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying ‘no.’ ” Absurd. Later he apologized for his “clearly erroneous” answer but explained that he had simply forgotten about the massive government operation to secretly collect metadata on hundreds of millions of American citizens. That was like saying Christmas had slipped his mind.
Lying to Congress is a felony, but Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, made sure the case was tossed into a broom closet. Clapper later lied to Congress again, flatly denying that he had discussed the Steele “dossier” or any other intelligence involving Russian hacking of the election with journalists. Asked specifically about his conversations with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Clapper acknowledged that he had done so and “might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic.”41 (A few months after the leak to Tapper, Clapper was rewarded with a contract as a CNN contributor.)
Possibly the most egregious offender was John Brennan, President Obama’s director of the CIA. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when asked if Trump was afraid of Putin, Brennan opined that the “Russians may have something on [Trump] personally . . . [they] have had long experience of Mr. Trump, and may have things they could expose.” No one on the panel asked Brennan if he had proof or was just speculating. Surely the former director of the CIA wouldn’t make something up? But when asked by the New York Times to respond to written questions about his wild claim, Brennan admitted, “I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail.”42
Instead of exposing Brennan as a liar, the Times published a story with this headline: “Ex-Chief of the CIA Suggests Putin May Have Compromising Information on Trump,” burying Brennan’s vacillation in the eleventh paragraph. This is not journalism; it’s a political smear aided and abetted by those catering to the clicks of readers desperate to hear the worst about Trump.
Many viewers sensed what was going on. A Monmouth University poll released in April 2018 showed that public trust had dropped precipitously from just a year earlier, when the media’s Russian obsession had erupted. Of 803 Americans who responded to a survey that March, 77 percent agreed that major traditional television and newspaper outlets report “fake news,” compared to 63 percent the year before. That response wasn’t limited to those on the right; 61 percent of Democrats believed that media outlets peddled misinformation.43
That belief was reinforced by a strange phenomenon that gave new meaning to the term “echo chamber.” On certain networks, catchphrases were repeated by pundits, reporters, and guests, as if Hillary had handed out talking points at dawn. For example, the phrase “the walls are closing in” around President Trump was repeated fifty times during a ten-day period on CNN and MSNBC in December 2018.44 The repetition of the mantras reinforced the idea of fake news being dished out by actors hired to repeat lines in a play.
Russia Hysteria: The Media Loses Its Mind
Political essayists such as “Typhoid Mary” Kramer began painting Trump as beholden to Russia’s president well before the election, not long after Simpson had put his plan into operation. He had company.
In July 2016, Franklin Foer penned a pulpy piece of partisan fancy entitled “Putin’s Puppet: If the Russian President Could Design a Candidate to Undermine American Interests—and Advance His Own—He’d Look a Lot like Donald Trump,” which opened thus: “Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump.”45 Weeks later, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, wrote, “Donald J. Trump has chosen this week to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”46 Not to be outdone, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, published a column in August 2016 called “Trump and Putin: A Love Story.” Employing journalistic superpowers of precognition, Remnick declared that “Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him.”47
The scribblings of those three journalists likely left readers convinced that Trump was a “Manchurian Candidate.” (The original movie, not the remake.) All Putin had to do was activate Trump by flashing a Queen of Hearts card. Ludicrous? Obviously. But that did not deter Abigail Tracy from publishing a hit piece in Vanity Fair just days before the election with the titillating title, “Is Donald Trump a Manchurian Candidate?”48 As evidence, she relied on Senator Reid, who, she wrote, claimed to have seen “ ‘explosive information’ linking Donald Trump and his top aides to the Russian government”—in other words, the Steele “dossier.”49 However, clueless citizens could be forgiven for assuming that those well-placed, intelligent thought leaders and politicians had seen some of the explosive proof.
Other news outlets, such as Huffington Post, ran similar articles with nearly identical titles.50 The New York Times printed a column by Ross Douthat with the headline “The ‘Manchurian’ President?”51 Above the headline was a photograph from the 1962 film in which a Communist “sleeper agent” is programmed to take over the US government. Douthat, a purported conservative voice, wrote that it is not “impossible to believe . . . that Trump’s inner circle was actually colluding with Russian intelligence . . . or that Trump himself, for reasons financial or personal, was really a Russian asset of some sort.”52
The irony, of course, is that the media paid little attention to Hillary Clinton’s prodigious and lucrative connections with Russia. Incisive reporting that Clinton might have used her office for profit rarely appeared in the pages of the press or on television news.
No one had seriously accused President Barack Obama of “colluding” with Putin when an active microphone picked up his quiet words about missile defense as he leaned over to confide in then–Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev responded, “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”53 The press concluded that Obama was not a Russian asset but a cunning negotiator who was scamming Kremlin apparatchiks.
Journalists tend to occupy a bubble of their own making. Their thoughts and wo
rds reverberate against the walls and bounce back to themselves. They hear only their own voices in a self-perpetuating circle, thrilled to be retweeted by one another, Hollywood celebrities, and “legal analysts” such as Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, editor of the Lawfare blog, and close friend of Comey. According to the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, Hillary’s closest allies decided in the days immediately after the election to push two narratives to explain her devastating loss: Comey’s handling of her email investigation and Russia hacking to assist Trump. A Clintonite confided to the authors that Hillary “wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way.”54
Clinton campaign official Robby Mook, who had been getting briefings from lawyers at Perkins Coie, had spread the “dossier’s” rumors to friendly reporters, even saying publicly right before the Democratic National Convention that Putin wanted to help Trump win.55 A lawyer with Perkins Coie was also behind a lengthy story published by Franklin Foer just before the election on October 31, 2016, linking the Russian-based Alfa Bank to Trump: “Was a Trump Server Communicating with Russia?”56 Steele had written a memo about Alfa Bank’s connection to Trump in September, misspelling it as “Alpha.”
Clinton tweeted the same day: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” Attached to her tweet was a statement from Jake Sullivan, senior policy adviser to Clinton: “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. . . . This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.”57 The story was debunked; the alleged communications turned out to be spam.58 Much later it emerged that the lawyer pushing the story for Clinton had likely been Michael Sussmann, an attorney for the Clinton campaign and the DNC.59
Even as the janitors were sweeping up the popped balloons at Hillary’s watch party at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, her allies in the media took up the refrain. That’s how we got the run-up to the election so wrong! The Russians fooled everybody. “We may be living through the most successful Russian intelligence operation since the Rosenbergs stole the A-bomb,” wrote David Frum, the senior editor of The Atlantic.60 His colleague senior editor Adam Serwer wrote, “Congratulations to Vladimir Putin, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”61 Veteran media analyst Howard Kurtz of Fox News observed that by refusing any attempt to “normalize” the new president, reporters were saying “Trump is not a legitimate president and doesn’t deserve to be treated as such.”62
The condemnation of Trump for “colluding” with the Russians was just getting started. He was guilty, to be sure. The media just needed to prove it. And if they couldn’t prove it, no matter; public denunciations and smears would be sufficient. Because Trump was a public figure, they were safe from libel lawsuits filed in US courts. Often during television interviews, anchors and reporters would cite some encounter or conversation between a Russian and a person in the Trump campaign and then ask a guest the leading question “Isn’t this evidence of collusion?” as if some heinous crime had been committed by the mere act of a communication, association, or handshake. But no one would actually state what law or statute had been violated.
An example of this occurred on October 31, 2017, when Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow was interviewed on ABC by George Stephanopoulos about a conversation a peripheral Trump adviser had had with a professor who had spoken to someone in Moscow. Even though the adviser had not talked with the Russian directly and the content of the discussion was twice removed, the anchor seemed to imply that it was somehow illegal.
“There is no crime of collusion,” Sekulow said. “What is a violation of the law here?”
“Collusion is cooperation,” Stephanopoulos said.63
Viewers were left with the impression that the simple act of talking with someone constituted “collusion,” which equaled the commission of a crime. Yet there had been no secret agreement between the adviser and the professor to achieve a fraudulent or illegal or deceitful purpose. Was there a conspiracy? If so, a conspiracy to carry out what crime? It was left unstated, while viewers were fed the appearance of criminality.
Others took to the airwaves to either imply or outright pronounce that criminal “collusion” by Trump and/or his campaign was a foregone conclusion:
CARL BERNSTEIN (CNN): I think this is a potentially more dangerous situation than Watergate. We’re at a dangerous moment. And that’s because we are looking at the possibility that the president of the United States and those around him during an election campaign colluded with a hostile foreign power to undermine the basis of our democracy—free elections.64
DAN RATHER (MSNBC): Donald Trump is afraid. He’s trying to exude power and strength. He’s afraid of something that Mueller and the prosecutors are going to find out. A political hurricane is out there at sea for him. We’ll call it hurricane Vladimir, if you will, the whole Russian thing. It is approaching Category Four.65
PAUL KRUGMAN (NEW YORK TIMES): There’s really no question about Trump-Putin collusion, and Trump in fact continues to act like Putin’s puppet. The only question is how high the indictments will reach, and how much damage they’ll do. But it won’t be good.66
JAKE TAPPER (CNN): This is evidence of willingness to commit collusion. That’s what this is on its face.67
NICK AKERMAN, FORMER WATERGATE PROSECUTOR (MSNBC): There’s outright treason. I mean, there is no question that what he’s doing is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.68
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL (MSNBC): Donald Trump now sits at the threshold of impeachment.69
At the time of those legal and political proclamations by the media, Trump was only a few months into his presidency. The media obsessed over “collusion” without defining it. They either declared or implied that it was a crime that surely must exist in the vast body of law books. Just dust them off and you’ll find it there, buried somewhere. And Trump had surely committed that crime, they reasoned. Be patient; the incriminating evidence would eventually emerge, proving the media’s prescience.
At one point, MSNBC’s Joy Reid was so giddy over the prospect of Trump’s arrest, she even dreamed aloud on air about the day Trump would barricade himself inside the White House as federal marshals banged on the door to take him into custody.70 In Reid’s distorted universe, wishing was believing.
There was no credible evidence of any crime called “collusion.” Yet those individuals were waxing recklessly about such matters as a Russian conspiracy, treason, and impeachment in an attempt to convict Trump without proof, charges, or the benefit of that quaint constitutional protection called “due process of the law.”71 Their rants were the equivalent of “Off with his head, trial to be had later.”
The hysteria was fanned a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration by the Washington Post when it claimed that the Russians had hacked the US power grid through a utility company in Vermont. It was untrue, but it planted in readers’ minds the thought that those dastardly Russians were at the gate, with Trump ready to let them in unchallenged.72
In March 2017, Jennifer Palmieri, the director of communications for Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign, penned a column for the Washington Post calling for Democrats to “fight back” against the new administration. The Clinton campaign had tried to raise the alarm about Russia hacking stolen emails from the DNC to help Trump and hurt Hillary, she said. Alas, nobody had listened.
“The lessons we campaign officials learned in trying to turn the Russia story against Trump can help other Democrats (and all Americans) figure out how to treat this interference no longer as a matter of electoral politics but as the threat to the republic that it really is,” she said. “If we make plain that what Russia has done is nothing less than an attack on our republic, the public will be with us. And the more we talk about it, the more they’ll be with us.”73 The nation was at a tipping point, more serious than Watergate, a constitutional crisis,
she declared. “We all have a role to play in stopping it.” Meaning you Democrats in the media, bang that drum!
The smug Rachel Maddow took up the challenge on her prime-time show on MSNBC. Citing a New York Times story about Donald Trump, Jr.’s, emails, she proclaimed, “They’re not even six months into this administration and they’re confessing to colluding with the Russians during the campaign.”74
On the same network, Mika Brzezinski predicted the imminent incarceration of various members of the Trump family who had dared to meet or talk with a Russian: “I think they’re shocked that the noose is tightening and that people might go to jail for the rest of their lives.”75
Chris Hayes managed to surpass his MSNBC colleagues when he was asked by Stephen Colbert on CBS, “Are you all in on collusion?” In response, Hayes declared unqualified guilt: “The simplest explanation is that everyone’s running around acting guilty because they’re guilty. They’re acting super guilty because they’re guilty.”76 It was a guaranteed applause line, but guilty of what specifically? That vexing information was conveniently left out, although the fuliginous topic of “collusion” had been broached.
It should be noted that Maddow, Brzezinski, and Hayes do not have law degrees. Their collective experience in courtrooms appears to be meager, if not nonexistent. That did not dissuade them from offering confident judicial pronouncements. Yes, they are hosts of opinion-driven programming. But shouldn’t their opinions on matters of criminality be informed by the content of criminal statutes or case law?
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