Here's why you shouldn't let Trump 'attack reporters for doing their jobs' on Russia: Washington Post journalist

The summary from Attorney General William Barr giving a top-line overview of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference the 2016 presidential election has been billed as an exoneration of President Donald Trump. It isn't, and there is much more still to learn from the full report, but assume for the sake of argument that the full report did, in fact, absolve the president of any complicity in Russian counterintelligence measures. Does that mean that all of the time and energy the media spent chasing the story was a waste?

Some people certainly seem to think so. From Republicans like the National Review's Rich Lowry, who called the media "abysmal and self-discrediting — obsessive and hysterical" over Russia, to left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi, who compared the media's interest in the Russia story to their lack of questions over the George W. Bush administration's WMD lies.

But this is wrong, writes the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan in a new editorial.

"It should be no surprise to anyone that President Trump's reaction to the Mueller report is to attack reporters for doing their jobs," says Sullivan, but the calls for a media "reckoning" make no sense.

"I reckon that American citizens would have been far worse off if skilled reporters hadn’t dug into the connections between Trump’s associates — up to and including his son Don Jr. — and Russians. That reporting has not been invalidated," Sullivan continued. "I reckon that the felonious lying to the public about a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow remains a scandal — and that we know about this in large part because journalists were doing their jobs aggressively. I reckon that the hard-nosed reporting about former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn — roundly denied, you might recall, before it was proved — was an early sign of the venality that was to follow. I reckon that reporting by the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, CNN, Bloomberg News, the Daily Beast, Mother Jones, ProPublica and others drove forward a national conversation that needed to happen. As Americans saw with their own eyes Trump’s bizarre efforts to ingratiate himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, that reporting mattered and provided context."

Sullivan acknowledges that "endless speculative threads and the explosions of tiny cannons on Twitter were ridiculous and over the top," but that what we have learned from Barr's summary of the Mueller report doesn't actually justify the apologies some in the media are making to Trump. "It was strange, for example, to see Scott Pelley’s lead-in to CBS’s '60 Minutes' erroneously describe the Mueller report's findings in a way that Trump might have scripted: He flatly stated that the report, as described by Attorney General William P. Barr, exonerated the president. In fact, Mueller came to no such conclusion on obstruction of justice, and on the contrary stated clearly that his investigation did not exonerate him."

It would be, Sullivan warned, "a serious mistake" if the media is cowed into backing down from "aggressive coverage of Trump," although it might be an opportunity to do one constructive thing: shift the focus of the news from Russia coverage to coverage of policy issues, which voters on the street want politicians to discuss more of, and which in fact the Democratic presidential candidates are already doing.

"This observation is worth thinking about, and acting on," Sullivan concluded. "But that's not to suggest that serious news organizations should drop the Trump/Russia story, which is still playing out. Nor should they allow themselves to be bullied about the important work they've done, and must continue to do."