Russia and the US Press: The Article the CJR Didn’t Publish

Two and a half years ago, the Columbia Journalism Review refused to publish Duncan Campbell’s investigation into The Nation magazine and its apparent support for Vladimir Putin. It is published here in full

In 2018, Duncan Campbell was commissioned by the “voice of journalism” and “watchdog of the press”, Columbia Journalism Review, to write an investigation into the venerable New York magazine The Nation, and its apparent support for Russia’s territorial ambitions. In 2020, after a full fact check, legal review and edit, the article was cancelled two days before the scheduled publication. In 2022, months after Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine, the CJR again refused to publish the article. Byline Times is publishing the final agreed copy here, and Duncan Campbell explains what happened in a follow-up article: Who Watches the Watchdog.

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The Nation’s Russia Problem

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Duncan Campbell, 15 July 2020

One afternoon, five weeks before Election Day in 2016, on the 21^st floor of a tower overlooking Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue, members of The Nation’s editorial advisory board gathered for a twice-annual meeting. Katrina vanden Heuvel—the magazine’s editor, publisher, and owner—invited attendees to hear from a special guest, who had come to warn them that criticizing Donald Trump’s involvements with Russia, or his relationship with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, could trigger global nuclear annihilation. Vanden Heuvel, who was 56, gestured to her husband, Stephen F. Cohen, then 77, a retired professor of Russian studies. Russia and the United States “were closer to war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis,” he told the board. He also derided Democrats and American media organizations for “demonization of Russian President Putin.” 

Philip Green, a political theorist who had been on the board for forty years, listened with skepticism. Cohen’s theory, “presented with deadly and urgent seriousness,” he thought, appeared to be channeling the paranoia of the far-right. Others felt the same way. But afterward, Green says, “It became the party line.”

Cohen would go on to make the same argument in at least 160 Nation articles; more than a hundred talk radio show appearances; and on Russia’s state-owned international channel, Russia Today (RT). In many cases, his articles were “essentially transcribed radio programs that were unedited and did not go through other editorial filters,” according to Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor and investigative journalist. Accusing the Russian government of committing an act of war by hacking the Democratic National Committee, Cohen warned, might mean “the necessity of actual war, conceivably nuclear war, against Russia.” He wrote that “villainizing the Kremlin—without much evidence—is increasing the possibility of a US-Russian war.” Once Trump took office, Cohen branded media investigations of Russia’s involvement with the Trump campaign as “neo-McCarthyism” and “Kremlin-baiting.” 

For these critiques, Cohen won praise from outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart, anathema to The Nation readership; soon, he began making periodic appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight. “Today, in my scholarly, long-term judgment, relations between the United States and Russia are more dangerous than they have ever—let me repeat, ever—been, including the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen told Carlson in 2018.       

Nation employees became uneasy about Cohen’s assertions and who was airing his ideas. “The people who work there, especially the younger staff, are disgruntled about the Russia coverage,” Adam Shatz, a former Nation writer and literary editor, says. A joke began circulating around the office: “We tried to fact check Steve’s pieces but we couldn’t find any facts to check.” (Vanden Heuvel denies that her husband’s work was not checked by normal standards, saying that whether or not something is checked “depends on the complexity of the piece.”)

Some left The Nation or stopped writing for it. Anne Nelson, a former war correspondent now teaching at Columbia University, came to feel that the magazine’s stance on Russia “is destroying a valuable institution on the left.” Subscribers and donors, too, expressed displeasure with The Nation’s Russia pieces. One reader tweeted: “Sounds like the Nation has a pee tape out there somewhere.” 

After Trump entered the White House, Green wrote to vanden Heuvel, complaining at least thirty-five articles in the magazine had denounced investigations of Trump and Russia as being driven by a new cold war, Kremlin-baiting, or neo-McCarthyite hysteria. He argued that nuclear annihilation “should not become a weapon to be brandished whenever people begin to take concerns about oppression and human rights too seriously.” He went on, “Such language, especially when it comes as editorials, has the effect of stating an official position, drawing a line in the sand and leaving many genuine progressives on the other side of that line.”

Green’s critique had no discernible effect on Cohen’s output in The Nation. But vanden Heuvel made a peace offering: she granted two established Nation writers one-shot opportunities to criticize the stance that Cohen was pushing: Katha Pollitt, who devoted her column, “Subject to Debate,” to Russia (“I don’t understand this magazine’s adamant skepticism” about Russian interference in the election, she wrote. “If we don’t know what happened…how can we be so sure that it didn’t matter?”) and Joshua Holland (“It’s possible to take skepticism too far”). After their columns ran, The Nation’s messaging on Russia and Trump resumed as before.

Nation staffers were exasperated. “I thought it was bad for the magazine’s reputation and its stated principles,” Shatz tells me. He and thirteen colleagues drafted a letter of concern to their boss. Downplaying the Trump administration’s conduct “is a dereliction of our responsibility as progressive journalists,” it read. “The magazine is not only playing into the hands of the Trump administration, but doing a dishonor to its best traditions.” The letter reached vanden Heuvel’s desk in mid-June 2017; soon, it was leaked to The Washington Post.

Vanden Heuvel convened a meeting. Dreyfuss, a national security specialist, expressed his particular concerns. A few years earlier, after Dreyfuss had published a few pieces highly critical of Russia, vanden Heuvel told him to stay off the subject. It was an unusual request—she seldom communicated directly with writers handled by other editors—and Cohen had exerted influence over the decision. (“I did not agree with what Dreyfuss was writing,” Cohen tells me.) At the time, Dreyfuss had chosen to abandon writing for The Nation altogether; now he was upset as a reader. At the meeting, vanden Heuvel was “courteous and listened to everyone,” he recalls. They agreed that he would write a weekly column about Trump and Russia. Vanden Heuvel’s aim, she tells me, was “to foster, not police, debate.”

Still, tensions continued. In April 2019, The Nation announced that vanden Heuvel would move sideways, to become “Editorial Director.” After twenty-four years leading the magazine, she would remain publisher and “edit select writers and contribute regular commentary,” according to a press release. Her tenure as editor—which spanned the Clinton impeachment and George W. Bush’s 2000 election; 9/11 and the Iraq invasion; Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, and Donald Trump—provided ample challenges, many of which she met. Her colleagues, even her critics, have spoken to her intelligence and kindness. Her many admirable qualities as an editor, they tell me, make it all the more frustrating that, on Russia, she has had a blind spot. “She happens to be married to a very strongly opinionated expert on Russia,” Kai Bird, a Nation contributing editor, says. Vanden Heuvel’s baton was passed to D.D. “Don” Guttenplan, a former Village Voice writer and editor-in-chief of Jewish Quarterly, based in London. He took over last year, with none of this behind him.

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Controversy and internal schisms over The Nation’s Russia coverage go back generations. The oldest weekly magazine in the US, The Nation was established fifty years before the Russian revolution. Guttenplan has written about how, as the Bolsheviks seized power, Oswald Garrison Villard, the owner and editor of The Nation until 1935, veered hard left and employed “one of Stalin’s most energetic apologists,” Louis Fischer, as the magazine’s Moscow correspondent. Fischer covered up Stalin’s extermination of Ukraine by famine, in 1932, and falsely denied reports of starvation in Russia a year later. (Leon Trotsky described Fischer a “merchant of lies.”) In 1945, Fischer left The Nation after turning against communism and feuding with a new editor. He went on to teach Soviet studies at Princeton, where he would eventually overlap with Cohen.

Fischer’s role was eventually taken over by Walter Duranty—a reporter who had been fired by The New York Times in 1940 for misreporting the Russian famine and Stalin’s infamous show trials. On November 2, 1946, The Nation published Duranty’s account of Stalin’s first postwar purge. He gave readers assurance that it was “a general cleaning out of the cobwebs and mess which accumulate in any house.” (In 1988, Russian historians estimated that a million citizens were arrested.) 

During World War Two, The Nation’s opposition to fascism and avowed support for Stalin temporarily positioned the magazine as mainstream and patriotic. When Freda Kirchwey, the editor at the time, celebrated her twenty-fifth anniversary at the magazine, in 1944, she was honored with a dinner attended by 1,300 people, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. 

A decade later, however, Kirchwey, who continued to support Stalin and advocated detente with the Soviet Union, would become a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and face the House Un-American Activities Committee—a turn of events that, past and present Nation writers say, fostered reflexive distrust of federal intelligence agencies at the magazine.

The Nation’s current succession began in 1977, when Victor Navasky, backed financially by a twenty-six year-old Harvard graduate named Hamilton Fish III, acquired the magazine for $150,000 and raised nearly $1 million more for a relaunch. As editor, Navasky established an internship program, aiming to form a meticulous fact-checking department. Guttenplan began at The Nation in this role, in 1979, as did vanden Heuvel, in 1980. Being an intern, vanden Heuvel tells me, “introduced me to The Nation’s courage.”