Former US President Donald Trump has lashed out at the Pulitzer Prize Board, after a scathing account of the US media’s role in the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy, including Trump’s relationship with the press, was published by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). Trump had previously filed a lawsuit against the body.
In a post on his Truth Social network on Monday, Trump blasted the Washington Post and the New York Times over their Pulitzer-winning coverage of “the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” He called the CJR piece “devastating, irrefutable,” and claimed that his lawsuit against the board would “set the record straight.”
Trump sued in a Florida court last December, alleging that the Pulitzer board damaged his reputation by refusing to revoke the 2018 national news award to the Post and the Times for their coverage of the Trump campaign and now-debunked allegations it colluded with Russia.
Last month, a US district judge cited the legal claim among others filed on behalf of Trump, which the ruling said constituted a “pattern of abuse of the courts” with frivolous litigation against political opponents. The court ordered Trump and his attorney to pay a fine of almost $1 million.
The CJR review was published in late January and is described as “a look back at what the press got right, and what it got wrong” about Trump’s presidency. It noted that “few news organizations have reckoned seriously with what transpired” during that time, and that this failure “will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.”
The relationship was “an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency,” according to the report. Trump and “his acolytes in the conservative media fueled the ensuing political storm, but the hottest flashpoints emerged from the work of mainstream journalism,” it said. Many Russiagate news stories “wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information.”