A ‘catastrophic media failure’? Not so fast ...

It took only minutes from the release of Attorney General William Barr’s four-page memo about the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election for the harsh spotlight to turn to media coverage of the past two years. The Trump White House and its echo chambers at Fox News and beyond instantly tried to use Barr’s letter to discredit anything and everything that was written and said about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and where it might lead.

Barr’s semi-cryptic disclosure about the still-secret report of nearly 400 pages was that Mueller “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” during the campaign. Barr further noted that the special counsel “did not draw a conclusion” about whether obstruction of justice occurred — though Barr and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, who had overseen Mueller’s work, concluded on their own that it did not.

With those morsels of quasi-vindication, Team Trump went feral, especially against the media.

The president quickly claimed “total and complete exoneration,” though even Barr’s meager account of the Mueller report explicitly stated that the president was not being exonerated on obstruction of justice. Trump called the probe “an illegal takedown that failed.” The piling on continued, mostly from the right, but also from the left.

Conservative writer Rich Lowry said the biggest three losers from the report, which, notably, neither he nor the many other instant commentators had read, were: “the media, the media, the media.” Trump’s adviser/mouthpiece from Fox News, Sean Hannity, vowed to “hold every liar, every propagandist, every conspiracy theorist accountable.” From the left, Glenn Greenwald said, “If there’s no media reckoning for what they did, don’t ever complain again when people attack the media as ‘fake news’ or identify

them as one of the country’s most toxic and destructive forces.”

An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Sean Davis of the Federalist was headlined, “A Catastrophic Media Failure.”

But was it? Consider these three points:

 The Mueller report has not been made public. The fact that the special counsel did not find sufficient proof of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian actors meddling in the election does not necessarily mean there was no evidence of wrongdoing. Also, Mueller’s deferral to Barr on the “difficult issues” of law and fact was accompanied by evidence on “both sides of the question.” Barr’s predisposition to clear the president of such an allegation before ever bothering with the details was spelled out in a 19-page memo in June 2018, which may well have been one of the reasons he got the job — and should have required his recusal from this decision.

 Do not conflate the drive-by punditry one sees every night on cable news (whether Fox, CNN or MSNBC) with real journalism. The currency of those panels is extrapolation and speculation. Do you want to get invited back on prime time, whether you’re a politician, former intelligence or law enforcement official or columnist? Then leave your caution and nuance at home.  Perhaps most importantly, there has been some significant journalism over the past two years that has exposed the White House lies, the persistent clandestine contacts between Trump campaign operatives and Russians, the extent of Russian hacking and social media trolling on candidate Trump’s behalf, and the dealings over Trump Tower Moscow well into 2016 even as Trump was insisting he had no business interests in Russia. One of the dangerous aspects of this delegitimize-the-media effort of the Trump propaganda campaign is its obvious motive to cast doubt on the journalists who are doing their job as watchdogs and truth tellers.

In fact, the Washington Post and New York Times shared a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting last year for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested the Times and Post should return the prize for their “exaggerated and hysterical reporting” on Trump and Russia. Donald Trump Jr. said their Pulitzer should be converted to “#fakenews awards.”

I just re-read the 20 pieces that constituted the winning Times-Post entries. Those stories stand the test of time. Taken individually and as a body of work, they inform the American people in detail on what their government would not: about how the Russians employed a fake army of Americans to inflame and sway the electorate; how the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner concealed his meetings with the Russians, how the White House ignored warnings about the conflicts of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn; about the president’s refusal to accept the intelligence community’s evidence of the Russian threat; about how Donald Jr. reacted with glee to an email offering Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. (It must be noted that Junior released those emails only after he knew the New York Times had them and was about to publish).

Those Times-Post Pulitzer-winning reports are chock-full of well-documented anecdotes suggesting collusion and obstruction that may yet be corroborated in the Mueller report if and when it is made public.

It is not surprising that Trump would use the Barr memo to reiterate his refrain that the mainstream media “truly are the Enemy of the People and the Real Opposition Party,” as he tweeted. Accountability always has been the enemy of Donald J. Trump, who has made more than 9,000 false or misleading statements during his presidency, according to the Washington Post fact-checkers. Nor is it surprising that his characterization of the Barr report as “total and complete exoneration” is yet another readily provable falsehood.

His campaign against the press, so eagerly taken up by the Hannitys and Gingriches in his orbit, is as strategically savvy as it is a disservice to the public interest. Barr told Congress on Friday that he would forward the nearly 400page report, or truncated version of it, by mid-April. Each day that goes by is only going to solidify the certitude among his base of supporters of his simplistic narrative, based on a few dozen words out of potentially hundreds of thousands, that he was wronged.

The same Donald Trump who castigated Mueller as conflicted and on “a witch hunt” now praises the special counsel on the basis of the attorney general’s mini memo.

Keep this in mind as the nation awaits — demands — a more fulsome report from the special counsel whose team issued 2,800 subpoenas, interviewed more than 500 people — and obtained indictments or convictions against six former Trump advisers, including his campaign chairman: Mueller agreed, unambiguously, with the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the Russians did engage in a sophisticated effort to influence the election on Trump’s behalf.

Now think back to Trump’s standing next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last year, when the president of the United

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States openly doubted his own intelligence agencies against the word of a Russian president about the 2016 election interference.

The pursuit of the reasons behind Trump’s genuflection to a tyrant from a hostile nation is not only legitimate, it is imperative. The absence of a prosecutable conspiracy does not absolve Trump and his associates in the many other angles of possible malfeasance that Mueller and journalists have pursued.

Let’s wait for the full Mueller report to draw judgment on whether the journalists who have been digging beyond the party line represent a failure or a manifestation of their role in a democracy.

John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron

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