The Mueller report shows that despite President Donald Trump’s bombast and ridicule of the press and fastening the term “fake news” on any unfavorable story, the press got it right on numerous occasions. To take one instance, the New York Times reported in June 2017 that Trump ordered White House Counsel Donald McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump called this fake news, but the Mueller report not only confirmed the order but also established that Trump tried to get McGahn to deny that Trump had asked him to fire the special counsel. (SLATE, April 19, 2019, by Justin Peters)
Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review, April 18, 2019, reports that Mueller confirmed a great deal of key reporting including a detail on one story that had been retracted: that polling data would be passed on to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. “The key takeaway here,” writes Allsop, “isn’t journalistic self-congratulation; some details in Mueller’s report were previously misreported; others were altogether new. It’s the many, many times Trump and his minions lied to the press about accurate reporting. Given the destructive power of those lies, it is important to remind the public that journalists—unlike the president and his allies—were actually vindicated by the Mueller report.”
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