On September 30, Donald Trump tweeted in his inimitable style, “Anytime you see a story about me or my campaign saying ‘sources said,’ DO NOT believe it. There are no sources, they are just made up lies!”
More than a few reporters rolled their eyes. Trump himself loves citing anonymous sources when they suit his purposes. He spent years peddling wild rumors about President Obama being born in Kenya, and he’s hardly in a position to be giving a lecture on the ethics of accurately relaying information. But four weeks into his presidency, it’s becoming clear that perhaps the media need one. Their reliance on anonymous sources to report on Trump has become all-consuming.
It’s not without results, however. The resignation of Michael Flynn from his post as national security adviser seems to have been brought on by a stream of anonymous leaks that turned into a torrent. Flynn resigned, according to Vice President Mike Pence’s spokesman Marc Lotter, because the “vice president became aware of incomplete information” Flynn had given about the nature of his contact with a Russian official, presumably whether Flynn had discussed the issue of sanctions with the Russian ambassador in a late-December phone call. Flynn has insisted he “crossed no lines” and said in his resignation letter that he misinformed Pence “inadvertently.”
Despite any number of thinly sourced accusations—including that the FBI had “grilled” Flynn about the phone call to Ambassador Sergey Kislyak—no one yet knows what, if anything, Flynn did wrong other than upset Pence. Following his resignation, CNN reported that the FBI was not expected to charge Flynn with anything, and further, that the “FBI says Flynn was cooperative and provided truthful answers.”
Beyond Lotter’s vague statement to the Washington Post, it’s remarkable to consider that when Flynn resigned there had yet to be a single named source making a verifiable accusation of his doing anything illicit. This has in no way dampened the media frenzy. NBC’s Chuck Todd called Flynn’s resignation “arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-contra.” Dan Rather, who, in spite of his journalistic disgrace, is building a steady following for his liberal news analysis on Facebook, wrote that “Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now.” Rather’s remarks made headlines at the BBC, Vox, Huffington Post, and many other outlets.
The New York Times, for its part, headlined a February 14 report “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The story was sourced entirely to “current and former officials” who “spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.” And beyond the eyebrow-raising headline, it was thin gruel. Intelligence agencies “sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election,” reported the Times. But “the officials interviewed” by the paper “said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.” Further, they “would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians.”
The other wrinkle here is that the FBI investigation of Trump aides isn’t news. Shortly before the election, on October 31, the Times ran a substantively similar story about the existence of an FBI investigation, anonymously sourced and full of caveats. The headline on that story was “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Parsing the minor differences between the two stories, it seems the gulf between radically different headlines can only be explained by the fact that Trump was expected to lose the election when the first story was published.
Since his election, though, there has been a lot of rationalizing by journalists in defense of lowering professional standards. In a January 20 column, New York Times public editor Liz Spayd chastised her paper for being “too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had” on Trump. “The idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct,” she wrote. “If you know the FBI is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write.”
To say that Spayd, in her earnest desire to go after Trump, was downplaying the dangers of publishing incomplete information is an understatement. “Franklin Foer of Slate and David Corn of Mother Jones each took a turn at such pre-election articles [handling sensitive and damaging information on Trump],” she added. “Their stories may not have been precisely what The Times would have done, but they offered a model.”
That they did. In fact, the stories by Foer and Corn are demonstrably models of what not to do. Foer’s story was published October 31, the same day as the New York Times item on the Trump FBI investigation. Foer reported that a computer server registered to the Trump Organization had been set up to facilitate suspicious communications with a Russian bank. Hillary Clinton tweeted out a link to Foer’s story, and her campaign publicized it. It was quickly, and somewhat embarrassingly for Foer and Slate, debunked by technical experts. As the Washington Post put it, “That secret Trump-Russia email server link is likely neither secret nor a Trump-Russia link.”
The Corn story, also published October 31, was about the now-infamous oppo dossier on Trump, that among other things, alleged Trump had dealings with Russian prostitutes. Corn’s story was largely ignored at the time. It wasn’t until CNN followed up in January that the dossier story blew up—in both senses of the term.
Details in the dossier that could be easily verified turned out to be false, such as the accusation that a Trump lawyer had met with a Russian official in Prague. It’s now widely believed that CNN jumped the gun and failed to confirm key details because they were too trusting of the high-ranking Obama intelligence officials who vouched for the story. Naturally, those officials remain anonymous.
And yet, with their reporting last week on Flynn, the Times does appear to have now fallen in line with Spayd’s suggestion that the idea you fully vet stories before publishing is a “false construct.” This is obviously a questionable and risky reporting strategy, and one that opens up the media to manipulation by their sources, especially those in the intelligence community.
Flynn gave a defiant interview to Richard Pollock at the Daily Caller on his way out of the White House. He made a point that, regardless of the ultimate facts of his own case, is hard to ignore. Referring to the reporting on his phone calls, he said, “In some of these cases, you’re talking about stuff that’s taken off of a classified system and given to a reporter. That’s a crime,” Flynn said. “You call them leaks. It’s a criminal act.”
It used to be a specialty of the liberal media to raise the alarm about the shadowy security state undermining democratic governance. The New York Times won a Pulitzer in 2006 for warning about the post-9/11 expansion of America’s surveillance programs. Now it seems as if the paper is gunning for a Pulitzer by exploiting the same leaks it once warned about.
Flynn is just the most prominent and recent example of this media phenomenon. Anonymous sources have dominated media coverage of the Trump presidency, on topics ranging from the president’s private conversations with the president of Mexico to the White House reaction to Saturday Night Live sketches. It’s been the defining characteristic of Trump coverage so far. Some of this is par for the course for any new administration. But with Trump, the anonymity dial has been turned up to 11. And this for an administration doing plenty of radical or questionable things in plain sight that can be reported on with pungent on-the-record interviews.
The media may protest that the Trump presidency is uniquely threatening and dishonest, and thus merits uniquely aggressive coverage, outside of the usual journalistic norms. But in so doing, they may paradoxically help him. Trump already won an election campaign in which his ostentatious denunciations of the dishonest media were a prominent theme. And in the wake of Flynn’s departure, Trump is once again ramping up the rhetoric on leakers and the media.
On February 15, the morning after the New York Times‘s “Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence” headline, Trump tweeted: “The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred” and “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia.” Later that day it was reported that a Trump ally, billionaire Stephen A. Feinberg, is being tapped by the White House to head up a comprehensive review of the country’s intelligence agencies.
Anonymous sources may have won the battle over Flynn, but it’s far from clear they’re going to win a war on the Trump administration. ¨
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
