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Four months after the Beltway press badly failed in its coverage of special counsel Robert Mueller's congressional testimony on the Russia scandal, the D.C. press corps has a chance at redemption this week with the first public impeachment hearings of Donald Trump. Hopefully, newsrooms will be up to the important task at hand.
"The stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to fulfilling [journalists’] core mission: informing citizens of what they really need to know," wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan. Agreed. And here are simple instructions for the impeachment hearings coverage: Don't Both Sides it with lots of phony false equivalencies. Don’t treat it as theater. Don't obsess over optics. And don't pretend Republicans making wild, hollow, conspiratorial claims in defense of Trump are serious people.
The committee room in the Longworth House Office Building on Wednesday will host the first hearing. There, three diplomats will recount what they know about Trump's dealings with Ukraine, and how that government had to agree to investigate completely bogus allegations of corruption against Joe Biden's son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukraine gas company, in order for Ukraine to receive nearly $400 million in U.S. aid.
Journalists are already keenly aware that there's mountainous evidence, mostly coming from officials who worked in the Trump administration, that an attempted bribery of Ukraine took place. They also know that Republicans have been utterly incoherent with the various Trump defenses they have tried to float, including the claim that the White House is too inept to pull off an international bribery scheme. So it's imperative that news reports do not pretend the hearings revolve around a Both Sides claim, or that it's just not possible to tell which side is dealing with established facts and which side is basically making stuff up.
The press needs to redeem itself with the hearings this week because the way journalists covered Mueller's day of hearings in July was largely a disgrace, as the press gleefully echoed GOP spin about what a supposed bust the event was. Within hours of the two Mueller hearings ending that day, journalists followed Trump's lead and announced that the day's events had been a "flop," and that he had emerged the clear winner.
When Democrats hold gravely serious hearings, journalists inexplicably don their theater criticism caps and judge the inquiry based on its entertainment value. "Lack of Electricity in Mueller Testimony Short-Circuits Impeachment," The New York Times concluded, suggesting that "electricity" for the Mueller hearings was somehow important for possibly removing a sitting president from office. It was one of many theater critic-type dispatches the Times published in the wake of the hearings, as the paper focused not on the substance of Mueller's nearly seven hours of testimony (i.e. Trump's possible lawbreaking), but on the so-called optics of the hearings.
"The Blockbuster That Wasn’t: Mueller Disappoints the Democrats," blared another Times headline, comparing the hearings to a summer movie release. (Weeks earlier, when Mueller gave a brief public statement about his investigation, the Times dismissed his comments as “dry, lawyerly, scripted." The paper was expecting what, exactly?)
Over at Politico, a news story matter-of-factly referred to the hearings as a "flop," and insisted Democrats deemed the event a "disappointment," even though Politico couldn't actually find disappointed Democrats to quote.
Looking ahead, I'm cautiously optimistic that the impeachment hearings coverage will be better than the failed Mueller hearing coverage, in part because the two investigations are so different. The Russia probe headed by Mueller mostly took place behind closed doors and unfolded over two years. It was a difficult story for the press to cover because there were virtually no leaks, which meant only Mueller's team knew the extent of the findings. Then when he handed his final report over to Attorney General Bill Barr, who then released a false, three-page press release claiming Trump had been exonerated, the press ran with the GOP misinformation, creating confusion. Barr essentially signed off on aiding and abetting a widespread cover-up of the Mueller report. And the press helped, dutifully playing the Barr spin as news.
In truth, the Mueller report was a sweeping and damning indictment of Trump, but it took weeks for that accurate picture to emerge, thereby giving the White House a chance to create a false "exonerated" narrative. By comparison, the Ukraine story has been unraveling at a rapid clip and mostly in public view. That means the press has a very clear picture of the scandal and the confirmed misdeeds that have occurred, and journalists can see right through White House attempts to obfuscate. That means a Barr press release isn't going to work this time.
I'm also cautiously optimistic because the press understands the impeachment hearings are an ongoing process. When it came to the Mueller hearing everyone knew it was only going to last one day, and therefore the press put a weird pressure on Democrats to create some kind of stunning theatrical moment during that single hearing.
For the record, I'm not expecting a series of a-ha moments in coming weeks, the way there were during the Watergate impeachment hearings. (Think of when Alexander Butterfield revealed that Nixon had recorded conversations inside the Oval Office.) This is mostly because back then, Republican members of Congress as well as Republican voters were open to being persuaded. They were willing to listen to the evidence, listen to witnesses (most of whom worked for Nixon), and were willing to concede that their president may have been a crook. None of that, of course, applies to today. Just recently, Sen. Lindsay Graham announced he had "made up my mind" about impeachment, even before the public hearings began, and before a trial was conducted in the Senate.
That will certainly be the Fox News perspective this week, as they report a parallel universe depiction of the hearings. It's up to real news outlets to give Americans a true picture of the incredibly important impeachment process.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.