It’s virtually impossible to get anyone in the national media to concede that yes, Ukraine did interfere in the 2016 election for the explicit purpose of hurting President Trump’s campaign. And when one reporter finally does admit it, the result is comical, such as in this piece in the style section of the Washington Post last weekend.
The story, by Paul Farhi, looked at past articles written by reporter Kenneth Vogel, one in the New York Times and one in Politico, which have to do with conflict of interest questions swirling around Joe Biden and Ukraine’s 2016 meddling.
Farhi’s piece acknowledged that Vogel’s reporting on Ukraine “extensively detailed Ukrainian efforts to undermine Trump in 2016, such as publicly questioning his fitness for office, disseminating documents implicating Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman at the time, in corruption and helping a Clinton ally research damaging information about him.”
So doesn’t that settle it? Nope!
Farhi then went on to belittle Ukraine’s role in 2016, disparaging Vogel’s reporting for having “implied an equivalence with Russian efforts to undermine Clinton.” He was also sure to point out that Ukraine’s own particular interference wasn’t even close to “the type of hacking and disinformation campaign waged by the Russians in 2016.”
How’s that for a distinction without a difference? On the one hand, you have Ukraine’s government aggressively working to screw Trump’s campaign — so much so that one of its managers, Manafort, is now in prison because of those efforts — and on the other, you have Russia with “hacking and disinformation.”
Interference is interference. I know that the media prefer the kind that unsuccessfully attempted to keep one candidate — Trump — away from the White House, but that doesn’t make the interference on behalf of the other candidate any better, cleaner, or fairer.
If that were the case, reporters would have to admit that some foreign interference is fair. Any takers?
