How the investigation into The Nation magazine’s pro-Russia bias was canned by ‘press watchdog’ the Columbia Journalism Review
This week, Byline Times published a long-form investigation by Duncan Campbell into the long-running and controversial support of Russian policy by New York magazine The Nation. His investigation was commissioned by the Columbia Journalism Review and completed in 2019. The report was spiked by CJR in 2020 and held back again, even after a Russian tank army had rolled towards Kyiv. Here he provides the inside story.
Pulitzer Hall, an imposing neo-classical building on the campus of Columbia University on New York’s Upper West Side, is named for the endower of the century-old Pulitzer Prizes, the award of which is widely held to be a global pinnacle of achievement. The Hall houses the University’s esteemed Graduate School of Journalism and the Columbia Journalism Review.
According to his speaking publicity team, Review Editor Kyle Pope is “the voice of journalism. As Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, which serves as both an advocate and watchdog of the press, Pope sits atop the most prestigious perch in media”.
In December 2018, Pope commissioned me to report for the CJR on the troubled history of The Nation magazine and its apparent support for the policies of Vladimir Putin.
My $6,000 commission to write for the prestigious ”watchdog” was flattering and exciting – but would also be a hard call. Watchdogs, appointed or self-proclaimed, can only claim entitlement when they hold themselves to the highest possible standards of reporting and conduct. It was not to be.
Conflicts of interest must be recognised and dealt with. Candour and transparency are paramount. For me, the project was vital but also a cause for personal sadness.
During the 1980s, I had been an editor of The Nation’s British sister magazine New Statesman and had served as chair of its publishing company. I knew, worked with and wrote for The Nation’s then-editor, the late Victor Navasky. He subsequently chaired the CJR.
Investigating and calling out a magazine and editor for which I felt empathy, and had historic connections to, hearing from its critics and dissidents, and finding whistleblowers and confidential inside sources was a challenge. But hearing responses from all sides was a duty.
I worked on it for six months, settling a first draft of my story to the CJR‘s line editor in the summer 2019. From then on my experience of the CJR was devastating and damaging.
After delivering the story and working through a year-long series of edits and re-edits required by Pope, the story was slow-walked to dismissal. In 2022, after Russian tanks had rolled towards Kyiv, I urged Pope to restore and publish the report, given the new and compelling public interest. He refused.
The trigger for my CJR investigation was a hoax concerning Democratic Party emails hacked and dumped in 2016 by teams from Russia’s GRU intelligence agency. The GRU officers responsible were identified and their methods described in detail in the 2019 Mueller Report.
The Russians used the dumped emails decisively – first to leverage an attack on that year’s Democratic National Convention; and then to divert attention from Donald Trump’s gross indiscretions at critical times before his election.
In 2017, with Trump in the White House, Russian and Republican denial operations began, challenging the Russian role and further widening divisions in America. A pinnacle of these operations was the publication in The Nation on 9 August 2017 of an article – still online under a new editor – claiming that the stolen emails were leaked from inside the DNC.
Immediately after the article appeared, Trump-supporting media and his MAGA base were enthralled. They celebrated that a left-liberal magazine had refuted the alleged Russian operations in supporting Trump, and challenged the accuracy of mainstream press reporting on ‘Russiagate’.
Nation staff and advisors were aghast to find their magazine praised lavishly by normally rabid outlets – Fox News, Breitbart, the Washington Times. Even the President’s son.
When I was shown the Nation article later that year by one of the experts it cited, I concluded that it was technical nonsense, based on nothing. The White House felt differently and directed the CIA to follow up with the expert, former senior National Security Agency official and whistleblower, William Binney (although nothing happened).
Running the ‘leak’ article positioned the left-wing magazine strongly into serving streams of manufactured distractions pointing away from Russian support for Trump.
I traced the source of the leak claim to a group of mainly American young right-wing activists delivering heavy pro-Russian and pro-Syrian messaging, working with a British collaborator. Their leader, William Craddick, had boasted of creating the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy story – a fantasy that Hillary Clinton and her election staff ran a child sex and torture ring in the non-existent basement of a pleasant Washington neighbourhood pizzeria. Their enterprise had clear information channels from Moscow.
In the fall of 2018, I was introduced to the Columbia Journalism Review. On December 19 2018, Kyle Pope signed a contract for me to report in depth on The Nation and the background to its blind spot on Russia. The CJR urged me to look deep into the historic roots of the problems the magazine faced in publishing critical reporting on Russia.
By April 2019, all did not seem right at the CJR. But I failed to recognise the first warning signs.
On 9 April 2019, my line editor emailed me: “Kyle told me this morning that he would write to you to talk fact-checking policy and give you the info you need to reach Katrina and the new editor [of The Nation].”
Pope followed up: “Just thought we should [have a discussion], given CJR‘s past and current tie-ups with The Nation.”
We spoke for 31 minutes at 1.29 ET on 12 April 2019. During the conversation, concerning conflicts of interest, Pope asked only about my own issues – such as that former editor Victor Navasky, who would figure in the piece, had moved from running and owning The Nation to being Chair of the CJR board; and that the independent wealth foundation of The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel – the Kat Foundation – periodically donated to Columbia University.
She and her late husband, Professor Stephen Cohen, were at the heart of my reporting on the support The Nation gave to Putin’s Russia. Sixteen months later, as Pope killed my report, he revealed that he had throughout been involved in an ambitious and lucratively funded partnership between the CJR and The Nation, and between himself and vanden Heuvel.
On the day we spoke, I now know, Pope was working with vanden Heuvel and The Nation to launch – 18 days later – a major new international joint journalism project ‘Covering Climate Now!‘
Soon after we spoke, the CJR tweeted that “CJR and @thenation are gathering some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts” for the event. I did not see the tweet. Pope and the CJR staff said nothing of this to me.
Any editor must know without doubt in such a situation, that every journalist has a duty of candour and a clear duty to recuse themselves from editorial authority if any hint of conflict of interest arises. Pope did not take these steps. From then until August 2020, through his deputy, he sent me a stream of directions that had the effect of removing adverse material about vanden Heuvel and its replacement with lists of her ‘achievements’. Then he killed the story.
There is a mea culpa here. There was nothing secret about Covering Climate Now!. The CJR widely publicised the project, including a Facebook post showing Pope and vanden Heuvel side by side for the project’s launch on 29 April 2019:
The initiative and the tie-up were in plain sight. The project they launched was worthy. And it appears to have been a strong, important success.
Working on my own story for the CJR, I did not look behind or around – or think I needed to. I was working for the self-proclaimed ‘watchdog of journalism’. I forgot the ancient saw: who watches the watchdog?
This week, Kyle Pope failed to reply to questions from Byline Times about conflicts of interest in linking up with the subjects of the report he had commissioned.
During the period I was preparing the report about The Nation and its editor, he wrote for The Nation on nine occasions. He has admitted being remunerated by the publication. While I was working for the CJR, he said nothing. He did not recuse himself, and actively intervened to change content for a further 18 months.
As I conducted response interviews and finalised my report, the CJR’s conduct became increasingly odd. Weeks and months passed without progress. My line editor refused to take phone calls from me, corresponding only by email until the day it ended.
On April 16 2019, I was informed that Katrina vanden Heuvel had written to Pope to ask about my report. “We’re going to say thanks for her thoughts and that we’ll make sure the piece is properly vetted and fact-checked,” I was told.
A month later, I interviewed her for the CJR. Over the course of our 100 minutes discussion, it must have slipped her mind to mention that she and Kyle Pope had just jointly celebrated being given more than $1 million from the Rockefeller Family and other foundations to support their climate project.
I sent in a revised version of my report, amended to suit the CJR‘s style and structure. I waited for a move to publication. Six months passed. I included comments from the new editor, asking about his freedom to take different directions from vanden Heuvel, who remained as (and is now) the publisher, owner and funder of the magazine.
In November and December, there were fresh edits, then: “I’ve passed along your piece to Kyle for review. I’ll let you know when I hear back from him.”
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