The media’s increasingly misleading coverage of the DOJ’s Trump probe is now bordering on fiction
You’d the fact that the Department of Justice is criminally investigating a former President of the United States for stealing classified nuclear secrets would be a juicy enough story that the mainstream media could get all the ratings, page views, and retweets it needs without having to juice up the narrative further by mischaracterizing it. Yet if the past 72 hours are any indiction, even as the DOJ gets closer to taking Trump down, the media is largely getting further removed from any notion of factually honest coverage.
It all started when Rolling Stone reported that “months” ago the DOJ began interrogating people connected to Donald Trump’s northern properties, in order to assess whether he had classified documents there. Of course something that happened “months” ago is now an outdated snapshot, and the DOJ probe has obviously moved forward from there in some unknown ways. And since most of the media and pundit class doesn’t want to have to admit that it has no idea what’s currently going on, it instead decided to present this tidbit as if it were just now happening right now.
Cue the mistaken outrage from audiences, who have spent the past two days being inaccurately told that the DOJ is just now getting around to thinking about whether there might be classified documents at Trump’s northern properties, which would be negligent if it were true but it’s not. The original reporting said that this process happened “months” ago. That would mean the DOJ was probing Trump’s northern properties before it went into Mar-a-Lago. That’s a rather interesting revelation. But audiences aren’t hearing that unless they read the original source article themselves.
Then came yesterday’s New York Times article, written by Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt – two people who have spent years seemingly just going along with whatever stories Trump world pitches to them. This latest article almost portrayed Trump as some kind of strongman, thumbing his nose at the National Archives by kicking around the idea of demanding concessions in return for giving back the classified documents he stole. Of course the lengthy article eventually goes on to admit that Trump never actually even tried such a thing, and instead just kicked the idea around with his sycophants.
But the real problem with the New York Times article, as pointed out by Empty Wheel, is that it goes out of its way to give audiences the impression that the DOJ is solely investigating Trump for obstruction. The DOJ’s own documents, released by the federal courts, reveal that the DOJ is investigating Trump for Espionage Act violations, and that obstruction is just the process crime being tacked on. It’s as if the article were written solely to lift Donald Trump’s spirits about how much legal danger he’s in, so perhaps he’ll throw more inside tidbits at its authors.
Again, the DOJ’s criminal investigation of former “President of the United States” Donald Trump for espionage is the story of the century. It’ll be the trial of the century. The media and pundit class doesn’t even have to do anything, because this kind of stuff writes itself. Yet the closer we get to Trump’s arrest, the more bizarrely misleading the media’s spin on the story is becoming. This kind of thing won’t stop until audiences empower themselves to put a stop to it.
