Newsrooms have reported relentlessly since January 2017 that President Trump may have colluded with the Russians and somehow betrayed his country in order to win the 2016 presidential campaign. After hundreds of shocking headlines and potentially damming reports, we still have no idea if any of the allegations against the president and his inner circle are true, or the product of overactive left-wing imaginations.
Yet, reporters are being given rewards nonetheless for their Russia and Russia-related coverage, as if the job were as good as finished.
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CNN’s Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein, for example, received an award this weekend for their coverage of former FBI Director James Comey’s private briefings with Trump as well as their coverage of the infamous Steele dossier, a dubious, unsubstantiated work of opposition research commissioned by the Democratic Party, which alleges the Russians have compromising personal and financial information on the commander in chief.
“These four journalists and a number of other CNN reporters broke the story that the intelligence community had briefed President Barack Obama and then-President elect Donald Trump that Russia had compromising information about Trump,” the White House Correspondents’ Association website reads, explaining the reasoning behind the reward.
It adds, “The CNN team later reported that then-FBI Director James Comey personally briefed Trump about the dossier. Thanks to this CNN investigation, ‘the dossier’ is now part of the lexicon. The depth of reporting demonstrated in these remarkable and important pieces, and the constant updates as new information continued to be uncovered showed breaking news reporting at its best.”
The Steele dossier is salacious, obscene, shameful, and also unverified. We have no idea if its biggest claims are true, but we do know that some of them are false.
What happens if it proves conclusively to be a work of political fiction? Will the White House Correspondents’ Association retroactively rescind its award to CNN’s investigative team for what turned out to be nothing?
This is to say nothing of the many questions I have about the timing of CNN’s opening salvo in the Comey briefings story. There’s also the former FBI director’s claim, in a recently released personal memo, that he told Trump the cable network was looking for a “news hook” to report the still-unverified dossier.
Rewarding CNN for this coverage specifically feels premature. Shouldn’t we wait until the dossier’s most important charges are authenticated before we hand out awards?
The decision here to reward CNN is as confusing as the Pulitzer committee’s decision to give the 2018 award for National Reporting to both the New York Times and the Washington Post for possibly uncovering collusion between Trump and the Kremlin.
The New York Times shares the Pulitzer in National Reporting with The @WashingtonPost for coverage that unearthed possible ties between Russia and President Trump’s inner circle https://t.co/l4rodIjHy3
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 16, 2018
We’re rewarding people now for finding “possible” news?
This seems … ill-advised.
This isn’t to say the reporting in either scenarios has been poor or slipshod. Rather, it’s to say the Russia issue is still an open-ended story. To reward journalists for covering topics that aren’t even close to being resolved, and we don’t know yet if it’s even true, feels like we’re handing out awards for a job that’s only half-finished.
And what’s the point of that?
Full disclosure: This author is a paid contributor with CNN/HLN.
