Robert Boxwell

Opinion | After Robert Mueller’s report, the partisan US press must reflect on how it played into China’s hands

Determined to smear the US president while attracting more readers, the US press, including respected newspapers, sold a story of collusion with Russia that rested on questionable foundations. In the process, democracy began to look less credible

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Why you can trust SCMP

Robert Boxwell

Published: 1:30am, 30 Mar 2019Updated: 1:53am, 30 Mar 2019

One could almost hear the shot glasses clinking in celebration in Beijing last weekend, the chortling, the slapping of high-fives, or whatever it is China’s leaders do when they chalk up a victory. It’s hard to imagine a better outcome for them than the conclusion of the long-awaited report from US Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

If you thought an indictment of US President Donald Trump, to the backdrop of the US-China trade war, would have been Beijing’s preferred outcome, then you don’t know the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee. Trade wars and presidents come and go, and today’s troubles are but the blink of an eye in Beijing’s view of the world.

No, the Mueller report handed China’s leaders a much better indictment, one of the US press and, by extension, American democracy. For Beijing, working hard to export its “alternative” system of governance around the globe, the past two years of “let’s overthrow Vladimir Putin’s American president” in the US had a happy ending: Putin’s president is still standing, and the press’ reputation isn’t.

The US press used to watch over American democracy rather well, decades ago, when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America” and The New York Times and The Washington Post ran crooked Richard Nixon out of office. But those days began to end with the bare-knuckle partisanship that the Clintons ushered in during the 1990s.

And when Google and Facebook started drawing away the press’ advertising dollars, the industry’s financial decline began. Since 2000, thousands of US newspapers and magazines have closed and the Times and the Post, the two most influential of the ones that remained, had to choose between cash and credibility. They chose cash.

After spending a great deal of time and money trying to figure out how such trusted brands as BuzzFeed and Facebook (yes, I’m kidding) attracted clicks, they began “dumbing down” their product as part of a strategy to build “communities”, to use terms from former Times executive editor Jill Abramson’s recent book, Merchants of Truth .