This is, in many respects, a golden age for journalism.
With a president facing multiple federal and state inquiries — including one into whether a foreign government helped get him elected — the press has come through with some investigative work that can stand with the finest Watergate-era reporting.
Among readers and viewers, there’s a new appreciation for shoe-leather reporting. Clicks and subscriptions are up, welcome news for an industry in shaky financial shape.
But the ultimate prize has proved elusive for the scoop-hungry journalists competing to join the reporters’ pantheon alongside Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose methodical news-gathering for The Washington Post helped bring down a president alleged to have broken the law.
The perils of the chase were plain to see on Friday night, when the office of the special counsel issued a public denial of what had been widely portrayed as a “bombshell report” from BuzzFeed News.
The site, based in New York, has been as aggressive as any other news outlet in trying to break the Big One. Its latest attempt, published Thursday night, reported that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had evidence that President Trump had instructed his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen to lie to Congress.
In their race to get ahead of Mr. Mueller with news that will please much of the electorate while also driving clicks and ratings, however, journalists throughout the media have produced their share of misfires and unforced errors. Each mistake has been a gift to the president, providing fodder for his case that any unflattering reporting about him amounts to “fake news,” and that the special counsel’s investigation is nothing but a “witch hunt.”
The insatiable appetite of social media and cable news for fresh material makes the hunt for big stories even more perilous.
“I say to you on the record, I am thankful I don’t have to cover this story on a daily basis,” said Mr. Woodward, whose latest book, “Fear,” a fly-on-the-wall view of the Trump administration’s first year, has sold some two million copies.
“The hydraulic pressure in the system is just so great,” he added. “The impatience of the internet — ‘give it to us immediately’ — drives so much, it’s hard to sort something like this out.”
BuzzFeed’s business model is built on that immediacy. Its newsroom is part of an organization whose mission is to find or create viral content. So you have serious journalism sitting almost side by side with lighthearted listicles like “28 Ryan Reynolds Tweets About Parenting That Will Make You Laugh Out Loud.”
BuzzFeed News has produced top-flight work. But in fashioning itself as a 21st-century upstart challenging the traditionalists, it has also pushed the limits.
It was the first to publish the collection of reports that were put together by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign. Known as the dossier, the 35-page file was filled with what were at least then-unsubstantiated (and salacious) reports about Mr. Trump said to have been collected by Russian agents for blackmail purposes. Other news organizations, including this one, had all or part of the dossier, but decided against publishing any of its contents they couldn’t independently verify.
The BuzzFeed News editor in chief, Ben Smith, argued that the dossier was worthy of release without full journalistic corroboration, partly because its contents had been shared with President Trump and others “at the highest levels of the U.S. government.” Providing that level of transparency, he argued, was “how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”
BuzzFeed’s report last week was more traditional, providing information from “two federal law enforcement officials,” as the article described its sources. According to the piece, Mr. Mueller was in possession of documents, text messages and testimony from Mr. Cohen showing that Mr. Trump had directed him to lie to Congress about Trump business dealings in Moscow in 2016.
BuzzFeed said the report was months in the making. But, given the weightiness of the accusations, the final push for input from Mr. Mueller’s office appears to have taken place on internet time.
Jason Leopold, one of the article’s co-writers, sent a heads-up email to Mr. Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, only several hours before publication. In the exchange, which was first reported by The Washington Post, Mr. Leopold said that he was planning to report “Michael Cohen was directed by President Trump himself to lie to Congress about his negotiations related to the Trump Moscow project.”
The email did not mention that the article would also assert that Mr. Mueller had substantial evidence of the supposed presidential marching orders — a vital component that gave the story so much apparent heft.
To be fair, Fortress Mueller has been a frustration for reporters. The special counsel’s office has kept leaks to a minimum while refusing, for the most part, to confirm or deny whatever report about its work is firing up the news algorithm. While its impenetrability may explain the BuzzFeed reporters’ casual-seeming approach, it’s not much of an excuse for skipping the steps taught in Journalism 101.
The Mueller team’s challenge to the BuzzFeed report is also exposing the flaws of the wider media ecosystem, which is all too ready to spring into action at any sign of the Big One. Within minutes of the article’s publication on Thursday, Twitter was ablaze, and cable panelists were effusive. “This is stunning,” Don Lemon said on CNN. Lawrence O’Donnell spoke of “a Nixonian moment” on MSNBC.
Fox News reported the article’s claims as potentially an “enormous, enormous problem for this presidency.” But the guest who described it that way, the Fox News contributor Guy Benson, also warned, “Proceed with caution on this story — it may be true, it may not.”
By the following morning, other news organizations had failed to match the BuzzFeed piece with their own reporting and increasingly included “if true” caveats — but that didn’t prevent hours of on-air speculation about the potential implications of “subornation of perjury,” with its echoes of Watergate.
Even after the special counsel’s statement on Friday night, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC speculated that it wasn’t a true denial. During an interview with Mr. Smith, she asked, “Do you have any concern that this statement from the special counsel’s office might be an effort to dissuade you and dissuade your reporters from pursuing this, even if it is accurate, either because it interferes with the special counsel’s investigation in some way or it is otherwise too uncomfortable for this Justice Department?”
The further the disputed report traveled, the more it seemed to help Mr. Trump, who is forever on the lookout for material for the most intensive anti-press branding campaign ever to come from the Oval Office.
As the former Associated Press top editor Kathleen Carroll described the current reporting environment to me: “It’s a very, very, very high wire, with a load of rusty razor blades underneath it.”
Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein know better than most what BuzzFeed’s reporters and editors are now going through. During their history-making run, the duo misreported that a grand jury had received specific testimony about a secret slush fund controlled by Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. The grand jury portion of the story was wrong, and the White House pounced on the error. But the substance was correct, and history ultimately vindicated them.
Mr. Smith, the BuzzFeed News editor, told me that the special counsel’s office was “gnomic” in its denial. “We are confident that our reporting will stand up,” he said.
For now, the story has fallen into a nether region occupied by two other recent, potentially groundbreaking stories on the Mueller investigation that have yet to be confirmed by others.
The first is a report from the McClatchy newspaper chain that cellphone signals placed Mr. Cohen near Prague in 2016, around the same time the Steele dossier placed him there for a meeting with Russian officials.
And there was the report in The Guardian that President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had paid a visit to Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, before that organization released a trove of emails that the United States has accused Russian agents of stealing from the Democrats.
With the BuzzFeed story joining those two reports in journalistic limbo land, there are two options for the hair-trigger, Russia-investigation commentariat, said Richard Tofel, the president of ProPublica, the investigative news organization.
“One is, try to figure out right this minute what the truth is, when you have no way of knowing,” Mr. Tofel said. “Or two, and both social media and cable news are a little bit at war with this: Wait a minute.”
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