Howard Kurtz Halts Fox News Contributor’s ‘Russia Hoax’ Charge To Defend NYT, WaPo Reporting On 2016 Election Interference: ‘Let Me Stop You There!’

by | Dec 23, 2024 | Mediate, The New York Times, Washington Post

Fox News host Howard Kurtz challenged former GOP congressman Jason Chaffetz’s attack on Pulitzer-winning reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election as “outright lies” and contested the take by quoting back the Pulitzer board’s defense that there were “no actual inaccuracies” in the articles it awarded.

Journalists at the The New York Times and The Washington Post were awarded the 2018 national reporting prize for “relentlessly reported coverage” of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that the awarded stories were part of a “Russia Collusion Hoax” and wrote personally to the Pulitzer board in 2021 to demand they “strip” the 2018 national reporting prize from the journalists. The board reviewed the reporting twice, finding it to be accurate on both occasions.

As Trump ramps up lawsuits against media organizations, Chaffetz appeared on MediaBuzz with Kurtz to discuss.

Concerned about the drive behind the lawsuits, Kurtz said: “Trump has openly said, he doesn’t make any secret of it, if he loses these lawsuits, he’s still satisfied because it puts the journalists or media organization through an ordeal and forces them to hire expensive lawyers.”

Chaffetz replied: “Yeah. But he’s hand-picked some cases [in which] I think he has some very valid points. The Pulitzer Prize to hand out awards for people who were perpetuating what was proven to be an outright lie…”

“Wait, what’s the outright lie? Let me stop you there,” the host returned.

“Well, on the Russia hoax and they knew over the course of time that those were wrong, then I think the big question is, did they know it, when did they know it, did they continue to do those types of things, and that will play itself out in the court,” Chaffetz said.

He added: “That’s the type of thing that I think he’s going to say, ‘I can demonstrate, I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these things are fundamentally wrong, and you knew it and you continued to perpetuate the lie.’”

“The Pultizer board has said there were no actual inaccuracies pointed out in the article submitted by two papers, The Washington Post and the New York Times,” Kurtz said, ending discussion of the issue.

Watch above on Fox News.

The post Howard Kurtz Halts Fox News Contributor’s ‘Russia Hoax’ Charge To Defend NYT, WaPo Reporting On 2016 Election Interference: ‘Let Me Stop You There!’ first appeared on Mediaite .