Trump-Russia scandal revisionists smacked down in new analysis

Donald Trump and his apologists have long argued that the Russia probe was a partisan sham, and that revisionist argument got one of its most reputable endorsements yet.

The Columbia Journalism Review published a lengthy series by Jeff Gerth, called "The press versus the president," arguing that major news coverage of Trump's ties to Russia included "serious flaws," but Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop says the revisionists often oversimplify or overhype real, and sometimes defensible, mistakes made early on in coverage of the alleged conspiracy.

"The revisionists’ issue with Trump-Russia coverage isn’t just about the stories that were factually wrong," Porkop writes. "It’s about something bigger, broader, and a bit tougher to pin down: the 'narrative.' Media coverage that is accurate and even arguably justified can create an unfair or misleading narrative, due less to the facts than to proportion, hype, tone, and implication."

Prokop cites two genres of reports that have held up less well -- the ominous "Russia contacts" stories involving one Trump associate or another and the panic over Russian trolls pumping propaganda into American politics -- but he argues that, in 2017 and 2018, it appeared the investigation would potentially bring down the president or lead to his impeachment, so it made sense for the media to cover those queries, even if the darkest suspicions failed to pan out.

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"How should the media cover these unfolding investigations when information about them is incomplete and imperfect and the full story really isn’t initially clear?" Prokop writes. "How much coverage is too much and how much is not enough? Can the press really know in advance which investigation is a nothingburger and which isn’t? These are tough questions with no easy answers."

Revisionists have argued that threats posed by Trump were overhyped by a partisan media, but Prokop says the former president's behavior after the 2020 election rendered those claims pointless.

"To be clear, there was too much hysterical and flawed reporting in Trump-Russia coverage, and that shouldn’t be defended," Prokop writes. "But a great deal of thoughtful, rigorous, and newsworthy work took place on that beat too. Journalists did not in the end find that Trump cut a deal with the Kremlin in 2016, but they unearthed a great deal about Trump and his allies in the process."

"Dismissing the whole thing as a hoax or debacle — as the revisionists are doing — is too pat a dismissal," he concludes. "It was a complicated, messy endeavor in a complicated, messy time."