Takeaway from BuzzFeed's Michael Cohen-Donald Trump report: Journalists police themselves
In the hours after the special counsel’s office disputed BuzzFeed’s "the president told me to lie” story about the Russia investigation, journalists reacted in Twitter’s public square and elsewhere.
The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow tweeted that he declined to run with parts of the narrative based on his source disputing that Donald Trump gave such orders to lawyer Michael Cohen.
On MSNBC, Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff described the “red flags in the BuzzFeed story from the get-go.” The New York Times wrote that a person ”familiar with Mr. Cohen’s testimony” said Cohen did not state he was pressured to lie to Congress.
And media reporter Paul Farhi of the Washington Post wrote that BuzzFeed’s “apparently mistaken story . . . is the highest profile misstep yet for a news organization during a period of heightened and intense scrutiny of the press.”
The final test of the story’s validity must await Robert Mueller’s report. Is the special counsel implying that to his knowledge Trump did not suborn perjury, or is he saying instead that the evidence corroborating that crime is not as BuzzFeed states?
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If it’s the latter, then we are seeing a reprise of a Washington Post story by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in October 1972. The famed Watergate reporting duo wrote that Nixon aide Hugh Sloan’s grand jury testimony had linked Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to a slush fund.
In fact, Sloan had told this to the prosecutor but was not asked about it before the grand jury. Despite the key point of the story being correct, Bernstein has called the error “a very serious mistake” showing that precision matters.
Cohen report reveals deeper journalism truth
However BuzzFeed’s reporting turns out, we should not miss a deeper truth.
As is being made plain once again, journalism is a self-policing profession. BuzzFeed is being challenged by multiple news organizations that do not view their job as defending the president — or their media brethren.
The episode shows that “the media” are not a monolith, but rather a wide range of outlets, most of which regard accuracy and credibility as core values.
When so many peers care deeply about whether BuzzFeed got it right, it shows how they expect and value accurate reporting. While some people shrug off the lies-of-the-day from our politicians, when journalists make missteps their peers let them know about it, and the rest of us benefit.
Just as their colleagues took to the internet, print and the airways to challenge BuzzFeed, so too did the long knives come out following errors, for example, by ABC in reporting about Trump’s instructions to Michael Flynn, by CNN in reporting on a Russian investment firm and Trump, and by the Associated Press in reporting about former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe when he was a gubernatorial candidate.
Journalism is self-policing band of professionals
With the emergence of fact-checking sites such as the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, we know that Trump has made more than 8,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency. We also know that journalists have a record of admitting mistakes, writing corrections and even reporting on their own organization’s misdeeds.
Someday we will learn how much to castigate or praise BuzzFeed, and perhaps its reporting will become this generation’s H.R. Haldeman story. And perhaps, someday — all of us, regardless of political views — we will recognize that digital and electronic media include institutions and individuals that do not prize untempered truth.
In the meantime, let’s not lose sight of what journalism has created: a self-policing band of professionals who speak up when one of their own falls short of standards of accuracy and thoroughness. Other professions would do well to take note.
Ralph A. Weber is a Milwaukee attorney. Martin Kaiser, former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is the Howard Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism. Follow them on Twitter: @ralphaweber and @MartyKaiser
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Takeaway from BuzzFeed's Michael Cohen-Donald Trump report: Journalists police themselves
