"People Get Subpoenas, Shit Gets Real"...

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“People Get Subpoenas, Shit Gets Real”: What John Edwards Should Teach the Media About Covering Trump
If you were in Las Vegas and could win $1 million by placing a simple prop bet on whether Trump enjoyed some pee play with Russian hookers in Moscow in 2013, would you bet yes or no? You know where you’d put your money. Even Mitch McConnell would take that bet.
by Peter Hamby

May 9, 2018 6:04 pm


When BuzzFeed News published the Steele dossier, in January of 2017, much of the media universe rushed to condemn the release of an unverified document that made a series of explosive accusations about Donald Trump and his campaign’s dealings with Russia. Never mind that the claims included in the dossier are a key piece of the special counsel’s investigation into Trump, or that the dossier was being circulated around the highest levels of American government on the cusp of a new presidency. There was a righteous journalism debate to be had! Brian Stelter of CNN compared BuzzFeed to WikiLeaks. NBC’s Chuck Todd told BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith: “You just published fake news.” Even Bob Woodward, the high priest of investigative journalism, lashed the dossier, calling it “a garbage document.”

It was a weird look for the news media: opting to give Trump—a man with a decades-long record of telling mistruths, double-dealing, obscuring facts, dodging responsibility, and trashing journalists—the benefit of the doubt over a news organization working in the public’s interest to keep powerful people accountable. The journalistic tut-tutting feels even weirder in hindsight, now that we are in the midst of a near-daily firehose of lies and leaks emanating from an administration with a demonstrated contempt for the truth and a flagrant disregard for the traditional ways of doing business in Washington. Trump should never get the benefit of the doubt. Yes, that’s partly because he’s Trump, a guy who admitted to a biographer a few years ago that he still has the temperament of a first-grader. But it’s also because Trump is a politician, and even the most well-intentioned politicians deserve the suspicion of the press, not our good faith.

Trump’s history, mendacity, and dubious associations—see Cohen, Michael— require a new kind of thinking in the news world, an even deeper skepticism from the press. There is too much tedious soul-searching in journalism, too many old-school homilies, too many painful attempts at forced balance. “Balance” is a feeble idea that exists only in American political journalism, where truth is just a two-dimensional political concept that lies somewhere in between Republican and Democrat. Fairness is something else entirely, “the best obtainable version of the truth,” as Woodward and Bernstein are fond of saying. Reporters should stop worrying about the 40 percent of the public, and their representatives in Congress, who blindly agree with Trump at every turn when he bellows about “fake news.” The truth is that aggressive, confrontational journalism is revealing more scandals per week than we used to uncover in a year. Trump proves the necessity of an unshackled press. Trump also proves, on a near-daily basis, that he is unworthy of our trust.

The latest reminder of this has come in the form of Trump’s new attorney Rudy Giuliani, who escaped from an Edvard Munch painting to inform the world that the president did, in fact, pony up the cash to pay off Stormy Daniels. Trump, of course, is on record lying about this, and so is his longtime flunky Cohen. These people are not to be trusted. This might feel like a blinding flash of the obvious, especially for the keyboard jockeys of #Resistance Twitter, but in Washington it can sometimes be hard to see through the fog. It’s genuinely difficult to make sense of scandals as they unfold in real time. We are inhaling bits and pieces from multiple investigations that feel like they blur together, and the only thing we can do is text our friends and say, “Holy shit, did you see this?” without divining any clear answers.

Truth-seeking is also genuinely hard for beat reporters, especially when you are in it every single day. You are talking to sources at all hours, some loyal to the president, some only kind of loyal. Some with proximity to real information, some trafficking in third-hand gossip. People that you genuinely like tell you something and you think, “Hey, maybe Trump didn’t actually do that awful thing? Maybe we are being too hard on him?” You can’t burn or antagonize these sources because you need them. You look at your Twitter mentions and second-guess yourself. “Am I being fair here?” You’re under a huge amount of deadline pressure from your bosses in a news world where scoops and cable bookings are the coin of the realm.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/what-john-edwards-should-teach-the-media-about-covering-trump