J. Peder Zane
Real Clear Politics, Feb. 3, 2023
“No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate”
In 1972, National Review magazine published a content analysis titled “Is it true what they say about the New York Times?” The analysis and conclusion reached in that study was an unwelcome shock to many of the conservative magazine’s subscribers, as it held that the Times was editorially balanced in its news pages, in contrast to its editorial pages. NR founder William F. Buckley Jr. took a lot of heat from his supporters, as did the co-authors of the study. Not surprisingly, NYT Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal loved it and bought hundreds of copies of the issue.
Five decades later, in early January this year, another study was published that comes to a very different conclusion about the objectivity of the legacy media, particularly the New York Times. The subject of this inquiry was news coverage of “Russiagate.”
This examination, undertaken by Jeff Gerth, a decorated investigative journalist formerly with the Times, was published by Columbia Journalism Review. It’s a tour de force! Having taken a year and a half to research and write, and at a length of 24,000 words in four installments, Gerth utterly destroys whatever is left of the lie that Trump was in league with the Russians, and of the extraordinary lengths the media went to spread that smear.
Taken as a whole, this series strikes me as the most important media criticism in my lifetime. For one thing, Gerth mentions a number of media outlets by name rather than referring to them in the collective as “the media.” This kind of specificity is rarely found, especially in news stories about poll or survey results regarding the media.
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