Access Uber Alles

TheOppositeOfInvestigative
JournalismVille


Maggie Haberman, the Whitehouse correspondent for the New York Times published a story, more than six years ago, on February 13, 2018 under the headline 'Trump's Longtime Lawyer Says He Paid Stormy Daniels Out of His Own Pocket'. Here is the lede of that piece:

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, said on Tuesday that he paid $130,000 out of his own pocket to a pornographic-film actress who had once claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump.

In the most detailed explanation of the 2016 payment made to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, Mr. Cohen, who worked as a counsel to the Trump Organization for more than a decade, said he was not reimbursed for the payment.

“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement to The New York Times. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”...

Now, that was pretty much straight up stenography that pushed a patently false narrative, unchallenged, that could, I suppose, have been justified by Ms. Haberman and her editors by the need to 'get things on the record'.

But.

More than six years later, we now know that Ms. Haberman of the Times had been under Mr. Cohen's thumb for almost a week before the story was published.

How do we know this?

Because it came up during the criminal trial of Donald Trump in a New York courtroom last week:

Texts from Michael Cohen to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman show how former President Trump’s ex-fixer worked to protect Trump from scrutiny over the hush money payment central to his ongoing criminal trial.

“Please start writing and I will call you soon,” Cohen wrote Haberman on Feb. 6, 2018, texts entered as evidence in Trump’s criminal case show.

Cohen subsequently texted Haberman a statement claiming he had used his own personal funds to make the hush payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who planned to come forward with allegations of a past affair with Trump just weeks before the 2016 presidential election...

So.

Why make a fuss about this now?

Because nothing about this was ever straight-up. Clearly, Ms. Haberman was doing Mr. Cohen's accessional bidding and gave him the story that he and, presumably, his boss and her bosses wanted in 2018. And that is a story, like so many others with no basis in fact, that has survived in the brains of many since then.

Which begs the question...

Which kind of journalism is more corrosive to the collective body politic - the 'catch-and-kill' kind practiced by the likes of American Media Inc (now A360media) or the 'accept-any-and-all-evils-for-access' kind practiced by the likes of Ms. Haberman of the New York Times?

Personally, I think the answer is obvious.

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