Most guest articles posted on SLL with either the mainstream press or one its organs in the title don’t do very well. This one will probably fare about the same, but this Columbia Journalism Review article about Trump and the press by Jeff Gerth has received a lot of attention in the alternative media and none in the mainstream media, which means it’s got something to recommend it. From Gerth at cjr.org:
The press versus the president, part four
Chapter 4: Helsinki and the $3,000 Russian disinformation campaign
Trump, in July 2018, finally had a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, the man he mistakenly claimed in 2015 to have met years earlier and his supposed puppet master, according to Steele’s dossier.
In advance of the summit, Trump met with his national security adviser, John Bolton, to discuss how to deal with Russian meddling. The president “remained unwilling or unable to admit any Russian meddling because he believed doing so would undercut the legitimacy of his election and the narrative of the witch hunt against him,” Bolton wrote in his 2020 memoir The Room Where It Happened.
At a press briefing, the final question was whether US intelligence or Putin should be believed with regard to meddling in the 2016 election. After going on a tangent about the server at the DNC, Trump said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that did it. Then, a bit later in his answer, he expressed “great confidence in my intelligence people.”
The first remark received all the attention. Some outlets, like the Times, didn’t include his comments about “great confidence” in US intelligence in their stories, while others, such as the Post, did.
Trump flew home to Washington, and when aides talked to him the next day about the reaction, he said he meant the opposite.
Today CNN, via Bob Woodward [
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 