Media

“I’m Holding My Breath”: Amid BuzzFeed’s Mueller Saga, Veteran Journalists are Largely Circumspect—and Confused

The news organization’s he-said-she-said with Mueller’s office has created a torrent of head-spinning news across social media and cable TV. The drama has also “mystified” many journalists, who are looking for answers, themselves.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller
Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrives for a hearing on Capitol Hill on September 13, 2011 in Washington, DC.By Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.

Journalistic institutions, especially in our increasingly complex social media era, tend to follow a simple (if also increasingly complex) mantra: make the news, don't be the news. During the course of a long weekend, BuzzFeed has lived both realities in the extreme. On Thursday night, its news organization published an extraordinary report alleging, among other things, that the special counsel’s office had documentary evidence that Donald Trump ordered Michael Cohen to lie before Congress—a head-spinning detail that launched a news cycle of impeachment-centric commentary. By Friday night, however, Robert Mueller’s spokesman issued a statement declaring that the “description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”

The careful language left BuzzFeed a little bit of wiggle room, but the response from the ordinarily taciturn and hermetic special counsel team was nonetheless widely interpreted as a blanket denial. On Twitter, and during subsequent TV hits, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith doubled-down on his organization's reporting. In journalism circles, though, people wondered if Smith’s career was on the line.

On Sunday afternoon, Smith and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anthony Cormier, one of the two reporters on the piece, appeared on CNN and proffered BuzzFeed’s strongest, most unequivocal defense of the story. Far from entertaining the possibility that some intricate nuance had been lost in translation, or that one of their two senior law enforcement sources had possibly misconstrued a detail, Smith and Cormier doubled-down on their double-down. “This is going to be borne out. This story is accurate,” Cormier told host Brian Stelter, who questioned him about whether a source could have been incorrect. “They’re not. They’re not. I’m confident,” Cormier replied. “We continue to report like mad, as we always do, but what we reported—the President of the United States directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress—is accurate. That is fundamentally accurate. We’re going to get inside the room where it happened and bear it out.”

The dichotomy between Mueller’s denial and BuzzFeed’s resolve has left many within the journalism world scratching their heads, including those who cover law enforcement and the Mueller probe. “I’m just mystified,” one national security reporter told me. “Anthony is so forceful, and so unequivocal in his defense. I just can’t find a way to square that with what Mueller is saying. They seem so damn sure, and I can’t tell if that’s real confidence because their sources are crazy good, or confidence because they know the implications of being wrong.”

Many recognize that BuzzFeed's credibility is now at stake. The organization has spent the past five years building up its reputation as a serious global news outlet with the chops to match its legacy media competitors. Its investigative reporting team, from which the Trump-Cohen-Mueller story originated, now numbers around 20 people. The site has broken a wide of array of major stories, including on the Trump-Moscow connection, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize last year. It recently prevailed in a high-profile court case involving its publication of the infamous Trump dossier in early 2017, another potentially reputation-damaging episode from which BuzzFeed ultimately emerged mostly unscathed.

Further, Smith is well-regarded among his peers as fearless and innovative: he built the news organization himself, and bravely led it through some of the darkest moments of the Dossier lawsuit. “Like most journalists, I’m holding my breath and hoping against hope that BuzzFeed can absolutely verify this story,” said Jill Abramson, the former New York Times executive editor who chronicles BuzzFeed extensively in her new book, Merchants of Truth. “Part of the reason I would be discomfited if the story is proven false is that BuzzFeed has really matured as a news organization. These are talented editors, and I admire Ben Smith’s transparency. He gets out there, and he’s standing by his reporters, standing by this story. He seems confident they’re gonna come out clean, and I am hoping that he has really great reasons to be saying that.” And if it turns out he doesn’t? “BuzzFeed has to be held accountable.”

Bill Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School and former Wall Street Journal editor, agreed that it was still too early to say whether the special counsel office’s statement had completely blown up BuzzFeed’s story. As perplexed as many journalism professionals are feeling about the whole thing, he said, ordinary civilians must be feeling even more so. “A lot of readers feel buffeted and confused, for good reason,” said Grueskin. “It’s very hard for the general public to verify information and understand the motives and credentials of various news sites. I don’t know how non-professionals do it. It's like going to two doctors, when one says you have cancer, the other says you’re fine. How does a layman determine who’s right?”

For Grueskin, the biggest concern is whether BuzzFeed prepared Mueller’s team for the gravity of the report during the pre-publication process. As The Washington Post reported on Saturday, BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold “made no reference to the special counsel’s office specifically or evidence that Mueller’s investigators had uncovered” when he reached out to Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr. Rather than providing an extremely detailed list of questions, as is customary, BuzzFeed submitted a far more casual query.

Smith was pressed on that point during his CNN appearance. “There's a dereliction of duty to send a three-sentence email for comment,” Stelter suggested. Smith replied, “It has not been our experience that the special counsel is forthcoming with information. … Carr has now said he would have responded in more detail if he had more detail. He could have said that two minutes later, right? He could have said, ‘That’s quite a statement. Tell me more.’ He did not. He said, “We'll decline to comment.’”

Grueskin doesn’t think that’s good enough. “It’s true that Peter Carr doesn't talk, but that doesn’t eliminate the need to give him, and Mueller, a detailed description of what the story would say,” he told me. “It also appears that the special counsel’s office took only two minutes to respond to BuzzFeed, which indicates they didn’t take it very seriously.”

Another reason journalists may be inclined to keep their opinions to themselves is because the outcome of the Mueller-BuzzFeed saga could well impact them, too. Mistakes happen in journalism, but in an era of #fakenews, their significance is magnified. It took only hours for Donald Trump to seize on the controversy. Had Mueller cast his scrutiny on The Washington Post or the Times, it likely would have been nanoseconds. At the moment, it’s impossible to know whether BuzzFeed committed a sin of gross negligence or something more forgivable, or perhaps no sin at all. But it’s likely that their very public he-said-she-said will be used in the president’s ongoing antagonism of the media.

Journalistic ethics aside, there’s also, perhaps, a cautionary tale about the modern media economy in all of this. BuzzFeed has made clear that its reporters spent months working on the Cohen scoop, and three editors (including Smith) worked on the piece. But there’s something to be said about the velocity at which the story caught fire without any corroboration from the myriad outlets that picked it up and spread it around. “I think it is revelatory about the way technology has changed journalism, because there’s no waiting anymore. It’s the mad exhausting dash,” said Abramson. “Something goes up, it hits Twitter immediately, and goes viral. Many, many news organizations picked up the story Friday, and while some of them had ‘if true’ in their headlines, many didn’t. It’s the ultimate irony because Jonah Peretti”—the founder of BuzzFeed—“is sort of the master of how things go viral, and this is such a good example of that. I just hope it turns out not to be a terrible example of it.”