Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack.
One of them was retracted by its publisher, CNN—a form of corporate responsibility never seen from a White House notorious for emitting six false statements in a single morning. Another was an opinion piece in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that did not claim to report news, but instead built known facts into a damning narrative of Donald Trump’s Russia connection. The other four range from the exaggerated to the unverified to the apparently mistaken.
But let’s take a closer look at those errors and what they mean. One of the stories singled out by Nunes was published by BuzzFeed News. That story asserted that Trump had explicitly directed his then–personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project. Cohen would ultimately testify to Congress that Trump’s direction was implicit, not explicit.
The distinction between explicit and implicit certainly matters. But Nunes wants to use BuzzFeed’s error to insinuate that Trump was somehow the victim of a false claim. Nunes is here spreading a bigger untruth than any mistake by any news source. […]
Source: Devin Nunes’s Attack on the Press Is Misguided – The Atlantic