‘Kick Him Off The Bench.’ A Judge in Trump’s Pulitzer Case Gets a Prize

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Question Everything

Episode: ‘Kick Him Off The Bench.’ A Judge in Trump’s Pulitzer Case Gets a Prize

Host: Brian Reed

Guest: Ben Smith (Editor-in-Chief, Semaphore, former NYT media columnist/BuzzFeed EIC)

Release Date: May 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores an unfolding controversy at the intersection of journalism, law, and politics. It centers on the ethical storm around Judge Jeffrey Kuntz, his pivotal role in allowing Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board to proceed, and his simultaneous pursuit of a federal judgeship—personally appointed by Trump. Through in-depth reporting and a previously-aired interview with media analyst Ben Smith, the episode scrutinizes how the “Russiagate” media saga was covered, the limitations of journalistic self-correction, and how, years later, these narratives become the basis for high-stakes legal and political maneuvering.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Judicial Ethics and the Pulitzer Lawsuit

• Introduction (00:00–02:36)
  Brian Reed sets the stage: Florida Judge Jeffrey Kuntz, while vying for a federal judgeship from Donald Trump, allowed Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board (for its prizes awarded to Russiagate stories) to proceed in state court.

  • Seth Stern, Freedom of the Press Foundation, calls for Kuntz’s disbarment:
    • "Kick him off the bench." — Seth Stern [01:15]
  • Stern alleges a major ethical breach—not recusing himself from a case involving Trump while actively seeking Trump’s patronage.

• Claims of Quid Pro Quo (02:36–05:35)
  Both Judge Kuntz and another judge on the panel, Ed Artau (who issued a highly partisan concurrence), were nominated for—and one obtained—lifetime appointments soon after their rulings favored Trump.

  • "It read like something Trump would put on Truth Social. The only reason to put all of that in a concurrence is that he was writing for an audience of one." — Seth Stern [04:28]
  • Brian and Stern discuss the corrosive effect: regardless of whether a direct quid pro quo exists, the appearance of self-dealing is damaging for public trust.

• Media Ethics and the “Russiagate” Pulitzer

  • Trump’s legal crusades against the press often target the narrative, not specific facts—here, he sues the Pulitzer board for defamation, claiming their continued support of the prize is itself defamatory after the Mueller report undercut some of the original narrative.

Revisiting the Russia Collusion Coverage

• Media Panic and Public Perception (08:30–10:17)
  Brian summarizes the scale of media obsession after 2016:

  • MSNBC devoted 32% of coverage, CNN 26% to Russia/Trump.
  • Despite no finding of conspiracy by Mueller, large swathes of the public (over one-third of CNN viewers, over 40% of MSNBC viewers) believed a formal conspiracy happened.
  • "That just isn't true. There's no evidence of that." — Brian Reed [09:57]

• Pulitzer Prize Lawsuit Origins (10:43–14:16)
  Ben Smith explains how Trump found a legal hook in the Pulitzer board’s 2022 re-affirmation of its prize. By moving from “opinion” to a declared factual finding after an internal review, the board opened itself to a (tenuous but non-frivolous) defamation argument.

The Limitations of Journalistic Accountability

• Journalism as the "First Draft of History" (14:21–18:47)
  Smith articulates the inherent limitations:

  • "The point of journalism… it is the first draft of history." — Ben Smith [15:12]
  • There are clear correction mechanisms for factual mistakes—but less so for entire storylines that, in retrospect, are misleading (like mass drone hysteria or the original Russiagate narrative).
  • Historical precedent: Pulitzer famously did not retract Walter Duranty’s pro-Stalin prize since, at the time, the reporting was accurate to known facts.

• The Legal and Narrative Stakes (20:41–22:25)

  • Trump’s lawsuit is about going after the whole “collusion” narrative—the impression the public got from saturation coverage, rather than any one “incorrect fact.”
    • "Trump wants to sue not over some detail ... but over the whole thing. ... He wants to sue Capital J Journalism." — Ben Smith [21:04]

The Steele Dossier: Ben Smith’s Role

• BuzzFeed’s Decision to Publish (25:11–27:13)
  Ben recounts why BuzzFeed published the unverified Steele dossier—as a crucial political document, not as a confirmed set of facts:

  • "We didn't publish the dossier because we thought it was true. We published it because we thought it was an important document." — Ben Smith [25:55]
  • He expresses regret they didn’t stamp “unverified” more prominently, noting how nuance was lost as it spread online, fueling misconceptions.

• Self-Authentication of Narratives (27:40–29:35)
  Both host and guest discuss how the media’s focus and law enforcement reaction to the dossier co-produced a self-reinforcing narrative—exacerbating both scrutiny and public suspicion, even as the original claims remained shaky.

Internal Reviews, Media Critique, and Industry Reflection

• Jeff Gerth’s CJR Postmortem vs. Pulitzer Board Review (29:35–33:11)

  • Jeff Gerth’s exhaustive Columbia Journalism Review piece sharply critiques the press, arguing normal standards were relaxed and skepticism was lacking.
  • The Pulitzer Board’s secret review (led by Reuters’ Steven Adler, revealed by Smith) found the awarded stories factually defensible.
    • "Had I thought for a minute ... who would I hire to conduct a review very, very, very carefully ... Steven Adler's the guy." — Ben Smith [32:54]

• The Lawsuit's Unusual Path (33:36–34:53)
  The case survived motions to dismiss, alarming media lawyers, and is now a potential vehicle for the right to challenge the bedrock Supreme Court case, Times v. Sullivan.

The Movement to Overturn Times v. Sullivan

• A Right-Wing Legal Push (34:53–37:01)

  • Judge Artau, in a recent appellate decision, denounced Times v. Sullivan, echoing Trump’s rhetoric (“FAKE NEWS” in all caps). If overturned, it could drastically weaken protections for journalists on defamation claims.

• Pulitzer Board: Standing Firm
  The Pulitzer Board responded:

  • “This lawsuit is about intimidation of the press and those who support it, and we will not be intimidated. The Pulitzer board will continue to recognize the accomplishments of journalists, writers, artists and composers at the highest level. We look forward to continuing our defense of journalism.” [citing summarization/paraphrase at 36:27]

• Reflecting on Journalism’s Self-Correction

  • "I think it would be valuable if the institutions that wrote about this stuff were able to reevaluate the story and to say in some clearer way, here's what we got right, here's what we got wrong. And in the context of the narrative, really... journalism isn't the final arbiter of truth. It's the first crack at it." — Ben Smith [37:01–38:13]
  • Brian adds: “It's like if we put the emphasis on the first draft part, it might be a little easier for us to say we got it wrong or we weren't exactly right...” — Brian Reed [38:13]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Kick him off the bench.” — Seth Stern on Judge Kuntz’s ethics [01:15]
• “It read like something Trump would put on Truth Social.” — Stern on Judge Artau’s opinion [04:28]
• “That just isn't true. There's no evidence of that.” — Brian Reed on media-driven conspiracy beliefs [09:57]
• “We didn't publish the dossier because we thought it was true. We published it because we thought it was an important document.” — Ben Smith [25:55]
• “Trump wants to sue Capital J Journalism.” — Ben Smith [21:04]
• “Journalism isn't the final arbiter of truth. It's the first crack at it.” — Ben Smith [38:13]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–02:36 — Judge Kuntz’s nomination and ethical controversy
• 03:10–05:35 — Possible quid pro quo for judicial appointments
• 09:00–10:22 — Media coverage volume and public beliefs post-2016
• 14:21–18:47 — Journalistic corrections vs. correcting entire narratives
• 25:11–27:13 — BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the Steele dossier
• 29:35–32:54 — CJR review vs. Pulitzer’s secret review; identity of the reviewer revealed
• 33:36–34:53 — Pulitzer case’s survival and risk to journalistic protections
• 34:53–37:01 — Right-wing efforts to overturn Times v. Sullivan
• 37:01–38:21 — The need for self-examination in journalism

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Thematic Takeaways

• Political actors can weaponize the lack of clear industry-wide self-critique in journalism, both for legal pressure and as a talking point.
• The norms and accountability structures of journalism are designed for factual error correction, not for assessing the impact of cumulative, narrative-shaping coverage that can later prove overblown.
• The lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board, at first a legal oddity, has become a battleground for the future of press freedom and journalistic independence, with potentially far-reaching consequences if Times v. Sullivan were revisited.
• As Ben Smith says, holding onto the humility of "first draft" status may help journalism evolve constructively beyond its mistakes.

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Conclusion

The episode paints a nuanced—and at times troubling—picture of how fragile the lines are between law, politics, and journalism in the US. As legal and cultural attacks on the press intensify, the profession’s ability and willingness to self-correct narrative excesses, and to defend its foundational protections, are being put to the test.

Transcript

[A]

Something I'm always thinking about is the way that algorithms are often self reinforcing, giving us more of the content and news that we want to see, which isn't the most healthy way to take in information. Which is why I'm excited to be partnering with Ground News. Ground News shows you how the same story is being covered across the political spectrum so you can actually get the full picture and not just the one version that's being given to you. If you want to check it out, go to groundnews.com/ to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan. Again, again, that's groundnews.comquestion. make sure you use our link so they know we sent you. Mr. Koontz, thank you. Chairman Grassley, Ranking Member Durbin, and Acting Chair Cornyn. A few weeks ago, a state level judge from Florida, Jeffrey Kuntz, testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in D.C. hoping to get confirmed for a lifetime federal court appointment that Donald Trump has nominated him for. I would like to thank President Trump for entrusting me with the privilege of being nominated to the Southern District of Florida, a district where I spent much of my career as an attorney. Then just last week, while the Senate is still considering his nomination, an organization called the Freedom of the Press foundation filed an ethics complaint against Judge Kunz. What are you hoping will happen?

[B]

Kick him off the bench.

[A]

This is Seth Stern. He's chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press foundation and helped file the complaint. It's quite a severe punishment they're hoping for here. Judge Kuntz is on the verge of being confirmed by the Senate for a huge promotion, a lifetime federal judgeship. But instead of giving him that, Seth wants the judicial board in Florida to take away Judge Kuntz's gavel and to strip him of his law license altogether. And here's why. Judge Kuntz recently ruled on a defamation lawsuit that Donald Trump has filed in Florida against, of all places, the board of the Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious award in journalism. As we all know, the president is on a legal crusade against the press. He sued the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, cbs, the Des Moines Register, among others, for sometimes billions of dollars. But this lawsuit against the Pulitzer board is definitely the most peculiar. Trump suing them for giving an award for coverage that was critical of him. The case is still ongoing, and that's in large part because of Judge Kuntz. The Pulitzer board tried to get the case thrown out, and Judge Kuntz, sitting on a panel with two other judges, ruled in Trump's favor. He Said Trump could move forward with the case, handing the president a big victory. At the same time, though, Seth says Judge Kuntz was doing something that he didn't tell the Pulitzer board about.

[B]

The Pulitzer board did not know while Judge Kuntz was considering their case that he had been seeking a nomination to the federal bench, a lifetime appointment as a federal judge while the case was pending. And of course, he is seeking that nomination from the Trump administration.

[A]

While Judge Kuntz was considering Trump's case against the Pulitzer board, behind the scenes, he was trying to get the nomination for a lifetime judgeship from Donald Trump, working to get a Republican senator from Florida to put in a good word for him with the president.

[B]

Obviously, Donald Trump has a very involved role in selecting the judges, who he commonly calls his judges. And word that a judge had ruled in his favor on one of his many frivolous lawsuits is likely to be helpful in securing a nomination from the president. If I were in front of this judge litigating a case involving Donald Trump, I would certainly want to know that that judge was seeking a judicial appointment from Donald Trump. Seems pretty obvious that he should recuse himself or disclose the conflict, but he did neither.

[A]

It looks pretty fishy, maybe even fishier.

[B]

He wasn't the only judge on that panel who was also seeking a judgeship from President Trump. There was also a judge named Ed Artau, and he not only ruled in favor of Trump, but he issued a concurring opinion in the case that read like a MAGA manifesto. It called for the repeal of New York Times versus Sullivan. It talked about fake news. It had all these talking points.

[A]

Yeah, I remember reading that. I think he says fake news in all caps.

[B]

It read like something Trump would put on Truth Social. The only reason to put all of that in a concurrence is that he was writing for an audience of one.

[A]

After this judge, Judge Artau, issued that Trumpy decision, Trump also nominated him to a lifetime appointment. And he got it. The Senate confirmed Artau to the federal court last September. This was despite Seth's organization filing an ethics complaint against him, too. So basically, what it appears has happened. Two judges who were hearing the case have ruled in favor of Donald Trump and have since been nominated by Trump to hire judgeships. Which certainly looks like a quid pro quo, even if not an explicit one.

[B]

Right? Whether it's a direct quid pro quo or whether it is just an effort by the judges to boost their stock to get on Trump's radar, both of those, under the ethics rules are not permitted. Everyone knows who they're dealing with. When you're dealing with the Trump administration, they're transactional. Do you scratch their back? They scratch yours.

[A]

I've been following Trump's cases against the press pretty closely. I know how bad they are for the press. But I hadn't considered this noxious byproduct that when a president is suing somebody personally, it gives judges an easy opportunity to use the case to curry favor with him by issuing decisions they know the president will like. The Freedom of the Press foundation has been trying to stop the potential graft by filing these ethics complaints. But according to reporting on Capitol Hill, it looks like Judge Koontz is on track for Senate confirmation regardless. The judge told senators that Florida's ethics rules did not require him to disclose his attempts to get the appointment from President Trump. Last year, I interviewed the editor in chief of semaphore, Ben Smith, about Trump's defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize board. Ben, who previously was the New York Times media columnist and before that editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, was reporting on the Pulitzer case and had dug up several scoops. And he was also arguing that Trump and his legal team are actually making a compelling point in the case about facts and truth.

[C]

I think legally, I think that's a very tenuous argument. Journalistically, I think it is a reasonable argument.

[A]

So this week, with Trump's judges from the case on the rise and people call falling for their robes, I wanted to share that interview with you again. The story of the President's lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board, which we first aired in February of last year. From Placement Theory and kcrw, I'm Brian Reed. This is Question Everything where we investigate how the truth gets buried, distorted, denied, and the ways that people are fighting to make it matter again. Stick around. I've been doing an update on my wardrobe lately for the spring and the summer, and I've been turning to Quince to do that. They have simple, comfortable, easy, good looking clothes and everything's a lot more affordable than similar brands, up to 80% less. I just got this matching chambray striped linen set, pants and shirt. I've noticed it's particularly lightweight, breathable. It's kind of like pajamas, but I can also wear it out, which is amazing. And I was wearing it around the house and both my wife and her friend who both work in the fashion industry, said, I legitimately love this. This looks great on you. They were really into it, which made me feel great. Refresh your everyday with luxury. You'll actually use head to quince.com? for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Quince Q U I n c e.com? for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com? Trump's Soup is about the coverage of Russiagate. Quick refresher in case you blocked this out. After it started becoming clear in 2016 that the Russian government had tried to influence the US election, there were allegations that Trump and members of his family and campaign had collaborated with the Russian government, maybe even conspired with Vladimir Putin to win Trump the election. Special counsel Robert Mueller spent the first two years of Trump's first term investigating these claims and the nature of Russia's involvement in the election. And the media could not get enough of the story. The numbers are kind of staggering. Looking back at it. Between Election Day 2016 and the release of Mueller's final report two and a half years later, MSNBC dedicated 32% of all its coverage to the Russia story. That's according to an assessment by the Columbia Journalism review. CNN devoted 26% of its coverage to it. By one count, there were more than a half a million articles and segments about the Russia story overall. And at the end of it all, Mueller did not find evidence of a conspiracy between Trump's campaign and the Russians. Yes, there were shady incidents, receptive emails and meetings from Donald Trump Jr. And some convictions that came out of it for crimes not directly related to the campaign. But but that Columbia Journalism Review study found that more than a third of CNN viewers and more than 40% of MSNBC viewers came away from the coverage believing that Donald Trump had a formal agreement with Russian actors to turn the election results towards him. And that just isn't true. There's no evidence of that. When I talk to people about how they feel about journalists, the Trump Russia story has got to be one of the top three examples they bring up as to why they've distanced themselves from journalism. And with this Pulitzer lawsuit that Ben Smith has been writing about, Trump is trying to force the issue. He's trying to force journalists to reconsider the Russia coverage in a way that is somehow both ridiculous and shrewd.

[C]

I was chatting with someone in Trump's orbit about all these lawsuits, and I was sort of like, which of these is your favorite? Which is the. Which do you think is the interesting one? And they were like, you know, no one's talking about this, but the Pulitzer case is both legally kind of interesting. Although I Think a lot of First Amendment lawyers think ultimately a huge stretch, I think is making an interesting argument about journalism.

[A]

Here's what happened in 2018. The Pulitzers did something unusual. They gave an award to two competing publications, the Washington Post and the New York Times, for their overall coverage of the Trump Russia story.

[C]

They covered it very aggressively through 2017 and were rewarded for their diligence for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. The highest award for journalism is for very high profile stories, but very capable reporters.

[A]

Something like 20 articles from both papers were listed as part of the prize. Stories about how Trump's national security advisor and attorney general had private discussions with Russia's U.S. ambassador before taking office. Reporting about how Donald Trump Jr. Set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer who was offering compromising information about Hillary Clinton, even though that didn't lead to anything. So these stories, they get the Pulitzer in 2018. Then the Mueller report comes out in the spring of 2019 saying these interactions didn't amount to conspiracy. Fast forward to the fall of 2021. Trump is out of office, and Trump

[C]

writes a letter to the Pulitzer board demanding that they retract their award to the Times and the Post, essentially based on the Mueller report and based on the fact that there wasn't evidence that he colluded with Vladimir Putin to rig the election. And the Pulitzer board then in 2022, put out a statement saying that they've reviewed the prize, they've conducted, in fact, a confidential review with a journalist they will not name doing this review. And based on that, they're standing by the prize. And Trump's lawyers see this and just see it as this incredible gift because the statute of limitations has run on suing the New York Times and the Washington Post for defamation. It's run on suing the Pulitzer Award for defamation based on the award. But this new statement gives them new legal traction. Had the Pulitzer board just said, screw you, we stand by our story, or expressed any other opinion, we think you're an idiot and should leave us alone. That would be opinion, and you can't. Opinion isn't defamatory. Or they could have said, you know what? We still think these are great stories. That's also an opinion. Hard to see how that's defamatory. But by saying we did a bunch of research, looked into this, that moved it back into arguably, and this is what a Florida judge has found, moved it back into the kind of claim that can be considered defamatory. And so they sue based on the new statement and say that the police report defamed him by saying that its old prize was appropriately awarded and it wouldn't retract it, that that's defamatory, even if all the other stuff wasn't. If you read the motions and the briefs in this lawsuit, Trump is not complaining about specific facts that the Washington Post and New York Times got wrong. It in its reporting for which they won the Pulitzer. And he's not suing the Washington Post and the New York Times. He is suing the Pulitzer board, and he's not suing the Pulitzer board for awarding the prize. He's suing the Pulitzer board on the grounds that when Trump demanded that they retract the prize, that that statement standing by it was defamatory. Because by 2022, you should have known that this was a wild goose chase and didn't deserve the Pulitzer. And in Trump's view, I think, legally, I think, you know, that's a very tenuous argument. Journalistically, I think it is a reasonable argument.

[A]

Say more. Why is it journalistically a compelling or possibly legitimate argument?

[C]

As somebody who did a lot of reporting on Russian interference, I think that's basically accurate. That that reporting, which. And the reporting on the Mueller investigation, which was itself dramatic and interesting, you know, ultimately was a bit of a wild goose chase. If you said to me in 2017, look, I think there's a lot of evidence that raises the question of whether Donald Trump is colluding with the Russians, you would not be an insane person. You would be looking at the available evidence and thinking, this is pretty disturbing and interesting. If you said that to me right now, I would think, well, like, you're a little crazy. Like, there's really not evidence for that. And like, every journalist and law enforcement agency has looked really hard at it.

[A]

Right. Our understanding of just the broad kind of consensus on a story changes basically over time as things get revealed.

[C]

But that's the point of journalism. It is. I mean, it is the first draft of history.

[A]

When Ben started going through the filings in the case, he realized, oh, man. What Trump and his legal team are trying to do here, the way the case is structured, the way they frame the arguments, it actually draws out in an illuminating way, a limitation of journalism.

[C]

One of the things that really distinguishes reporting and professional journalism from citizen journalism and from really hyper partisan journalism and from whatever you call all the other claims and allegations floating around in the world, is that when we get stuff wrong, we correct it. And there's a real mechanism for, you got a fact wrong, you are required to go back and Fix it or else your boss is going to get mad at you. It's the culture and the systems of professional journalism. There is not a mechanism for when you get the whole thing wrong. You can have stories that are factual, but that are chasing something that ultimately is nonsense. I mean, the most recent instance of this was all of the reporting on the drones over New Jersey.

[A]

Did you clock this story? At the end of last year, people started reporting all these sightings of objects in the sky that appeared to be drones, mostly in New Jersey. Seemed weird. 5,000 tips came into the FBI. Mayors and county officials started weighing in. People were demanding an explanation from the Biden administration. And then the administration started investigating people. News outlets started asking, could these drones be tied to Iran or China? Finally, multiple federal agencies released a joint statement saying these things in the air were not a threat. After Trump was inaugurated last month, his press secretary, Caroline Levitt, said this to reporters in her very first press conference.

[D]

Before I turn to questions, I do have news directly from the President of the United States. After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons. Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy.

[C]

I think the conclusion by many people is that was mass hysteria. But lots of reporters reported on what people said about drones in New Jersey. And some people quoted sources saying, it must be the Chinese or it must be the Iranians. And that was all in good faith. Right. But ultimately that was a wild goose chase and we should all be kind of embarrassed. But there's no formal mechanism for saying not. I got, you know what? Like that that guy I quoted in paragraph six, I got his name wrong, and we have to correct, and we're really sorry, but, like, we have egg on our faces and look like idiots because this was all a bunch of lunacy.

[A]

And there's also no formal mechanism for retracting a Pulitzer based on a sweep of stories that ages poorly. The Pulitzer's focus is on the accuracy of the facts.

[C]

The most egregious and sort of widely reviled Pulitzer ever was Walter Durante's reporting in the New York Times about how great Stalin was. Yeah, they did not retract. They refused to retract that after reviewing it because they agreed it was despicable. But they said, you know what? There were no fact questions about the factual reporting, and it doesn't seem like he was lying. It just seems like he was an idiot or an ideologue. The one case where I think the Washington Post gave back its prize was where a reporter had made up a kid and written a story about an imaginary 8 year old heroin addict in which she had lied. She'd fabricated.

[A]

Here's the statement the Pulitzer board put out after the reviews. This is the statement that Donald Trump is suing the board over. I'm going to read the whole thing because these are the precise words he claims defamed him from July 18, 2022, quote. The Pulitzer Prize board has an established formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from the New York Times and the Washington Post on Russian interference in the US Election and its connections to the Trump campaign, submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting Prize. These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our national reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes. The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in national reporting stand

[C]

it sound. It's a very kind of appropriately, absolutely literalist approach to the question of did these stories get it right and went back and looked at all the facts in the stories and the claims so and so met so and so and such and such day. You go back, yes, they did in fact be done that day. And I think that's actually a very strong defense of those stories, story by story. Not only did they not say Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians, they say here is a weird meeting that happened. But our FBI sources said they do not have any evidence that Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians, kind of story by story, they're not making that allegation.

[A]

And yet with every little scoop or headline flying around social media in real time, 24 hours a day, with people reacting and speculating to the new details like plot twists, with the constant coverage on cable news, Ben says that wasn't the impression one would come away with. And that's what Trump is going after the Pulitzers for.

[C]

Trump wants to sue not over some detail about whether some meeting with the Russian ambassador was on a Tuesday or Wednesday, but over the whole thing. You know, It's a very strange lawsuit. It's all about the narrative, the Russia collusion hoax. He wants to sue Capital J Journalism, which the Pulitzer board embodies.

[A]

It's kind of ingenious in that way.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think it, you know, it raises a really, I mean, it raises a very interesting point. It is also, by the way, a form of harassment against a bunch of journalists who are just trying to do a good job and award a prize. The Pulitzer board isn't itself like an institution. It's not like they're Pulitzers Incorporated. And these are the members of the Pulitzer Incorporated board. This is just a bunch of people who call themselves the Pulitzer board. Just a group of like 20 journalists. The new Yorker editor David Remnick, the editor of the Boston Globe, people like that.

[A]

And not just journalists, because the Pulitzers don't give awards only for reporting. There's a couple professors caught up in this. The poet Elizabeth Alexander, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, Catherine Boo, the best selling nonfiction writer, is being sued, not to mention journalists from local papers around the country.

[C]

And so the lawsuit is against all of them personally, which is a headache. It's no fun, I know, to be sued for defamation.

[A]

After a quick break, I asked Ben Smith about his personal role in the creation of the Trump Russia narrative, which was significant. The Trump team actually alludes to it a lot in their lawsuit. That's in a sec.

[E]

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[A]

We're right now in a situation where it's very difficult to understand what is real and what's not real.

[E]

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[A]

Welcome back to the show. I'm talking to Ben Smith of Semaphore, formerly editor of BuzzFeed News, about this unusual lawsuit Donald Trump has filed against the Pulitzer board. On its face, it looks like Trump being sore over a fancy award going to reporters who were critical of him, which it is. But as Ben's observed, it's also about more than that. Trump is symbolically suing Capital J journalism, or maybe another way of looking at it. He's suing American Journalism's board of directors for the media's years long coverage. Of Trump's connections to Russia. In a sense, Trump's trying to use this lawsuit to blast away the overarching narrative that has, for many, stuck as a result of that intense coverage, the idea that he was in direct cahoots with Putin and Russia. And Ben notably made a decision back when he was editor of BuzzFeed News that factored heavily in the formation of that narrative. It was the first weeks of 2017. Trump was gearing up for his inauguration, and a mysterious document was floating around D.C. it had been compiled by a former British spy who'd been paid by Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump. It contained a bunch of serious allegations, including that the Russian government had blackmail on the incoming president. This was the Steele dossier. The spy who'd made it was Christopher Steele. You probably remember the claim about the pee tape that came from this document. Very little in the dossier could be verified, and not for lack of trying by reporters. So in the news, no one was talking about it plainly, but around Washington, everybody was spies and senators and reporters. It was an open secret. Eventually, the FBI started looking into it, and then CNN did report cryptically and vaguely that both President Obama and Donald Trump had been briefed about a document with claims related to Russia and Trump. And at that point, Ben, who was again running BuzzFeed News at the time, decided it was time to publish it in full.

[C]

One of our reporters, Ken Bensinger, was able to get a hold of a copy, and where all the other journalists who'd gotten it had been given it on the condition they not do anything with it. Ken got it under a very classic and strange different condition, which was his source, a former aide to John McCain. This all later came out in court, basically left him in a room with the document and said, well, I hope you won't take a picture of this, and I'm leaving, and left him there for a while. And he, in fact, did take a picture. And so we had the whole document and didn't have any conditions on how we could use it, but we published it and said, this is an unverified document that we're publishing because it's influencing the workings of power. We didn't publish the dossier because we thought it was true. We published it because we thought it was an important document. I just want to sort of rest on that distinction for a minute.

[A]

Happy to rest here for a minute. An uncorroborated document with salacious claims was influencing US Politics out of view of most Americans. So they published it because it was significant. Not because it was true. Still, Ben stood in the newsroom and watched the metrics shoot upwards as thousands, millions of people flocked to buzzfeed to see the dossier. It was a firestorm. Ben says the one thing he wishes he'd done differently, he wishes he'd stamped unverified on every one of the dossier's 35 pages. Buzzfeed's disclaimer that the allegations were not corroborated got lost as the rest of the dossier shot around the Internet.

[C]

This became kind of proof that Donald Trump was a Russian agent without real examination of the thing itself.

[A]

I know that you, I've heard that you stand by the decision to publish it, and I agree with the decision, for what it's worth. But since we're talking about this current lawsuit against the Pulitzer board, where the Steele dossier is mentioned a lot, it's clearly a fixation still of Trump and his team. Understandably, when you look back at that decision, I'm just curious what you make of the reverberations that your decision to publish that had.

[C]

I mean, I think one of the things about journalism, whether you sort of like this about it as I do, or you hate this about it, is you don't know what's going to happen next. We wrote it was unverified and we didn't know if the specific claims were true or false and like that was true. And then the job is to go try and figure out whether they're true or false and you can't have a real rooting interest in one or the other. And I think that's sort of, that's how it works. It's a weird business, weird profession.

[A]

In the lawsuit, Trump's lawyers described the Russian collusion narrative as self authenticating. As in, the more media outlets reported on things like the Steele dossier, the more legitimate it seemed law enforcement felt moved to investigate it. The press then reported on those investigations, making it all look even more legitimate. Trump says this is a conspiracy, an intentional plot to take him down.

[C]

You know, they're sort of factual claims here about what happened. And the strongest claim, the thing that calls it a hoax, which is what Trump calls it, is that Steele knew this stuff was false, maybe the journalists knew it was false and the whole thing was spread to bring down Donald Trump. I actually don't really see a lot of evidence that Steele thought it was false. He just published a book, he still claims it's true. He's the last person in the world who believes Steele dossier, but he's still out there saying, no, no, this was accurate.

[A]

Huh.

[C]

So I don't know. Who knows? It's hard to know what's inside people's hearts. But I didn't really get the sense that people who were spreading it thought it was false. I sometimes thought they thought it was. They really thought it was true. They believed in it fervently against, you know, despite the kind of thin sourcing and the fact that people hadn't been able to verify it. But that's a real factual question, right? Like, did the people who were spreading it, was it a hoax made to stop Donald Trump or was it a, you know, set of claims by ultimately misguided concerned citizens? The one of the reason I think it's the latter is because if I was trying to stop Donald Trump with a hoax, I would have released it before rather than after the election. It's harder to stop the guy after he's been elected. Like, there's a reason they call it October Surprise, not December Surprise or January Surprise, because it's too late.

[A]

While the Pulitzer board was doing its review of the Times and Post Russia coverage after Trump's complaints and being all secretive about it, there was another journalist who was conducting his own reexamination. In 2023, Jeff Gerth, a former investigative reporter from The Times and ProPublica, published a massive four part postmortem of the Russian collusion saga in the Columbia Journalism Review. He called it the press versus the President. And in it he goes through at length every leg of that scandal and how the press dealt with each. Trump sat with Gerth for two interviews for this piece. Meanwhile, when Gerth asked journalists to talk about their coverage of Trump on the record, he asked more than 60 for interviews and only a fraction agreed. No major media organization made a newsroom leader available to discuss the coverage publicly for Girth's story. In the piece, Gerth bemoans how few of his colleagues would talk to him. He writes he was, quote, hoping they would cooperate with the same scrutiny they applied to Trump. Ben Smith did agree to talk to Jeff Gerth, by the way, about the Steele dossier, et cetera. In the end, Gerth comes down pretty hard on the press. He concludes that the media did get a lot wrong in its coverage of Trump and Russia, and specifically argues that news outlets loosened their normal standards when they were covering this story. He thinks they relied too much on anonymous sources and failed to report information that ran contrary to the popular narrative. He calls out the Times, for instance, for ignoring a document showing that the FBI's lead investigator didn't think after 10 months of looking into Trump Russia ties that there was much there. I spent the better part of a week last year reading this tome by Jeff Gerth, and I found it compelling. But then when I started learning about the Pulitzer lawsuit, I found it confusing. And I wanted to ask Ben about it because here you had two arms of the same university. The Pulitzer's are housed at Columbia. And Jeff Gerth was writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, conducting independent reviews by serious journalists and coming to what seemed like conflicting conclusions. One saying this coverage holds up and still deserves the highest prize in journalism. The other saying the press messed this up pretty bad. I read Jeff Gerth's postmortem of this whole saga and you know, there's a

[C]

section sidebar is so annoying. I talked to Girth for like an extended period of time, kind of against interest for his piece, and then he wouldn't help me with this piece. I did anyway.

[A]

Are you serious? Well, I want to talk about. Because he has a whole lament of journalists, like not being open with him for that piece.

[C]

That's like his whole, I know, I know, I know. And then he just wouldn't help me. I tried to call him on that hypocrisy.

[A]

What help did you want from him here? Just, I want him to leak me

[C]

the name of the reviewer.

[A]

Ben was trying to find out who was the anonymous journalist the Pulitzer board had brought in to review all the posts and Times Russia stories that they'd given the award for. The board was being very hush hush about this person's identity. An anonymous journalist. It's a weird oxymoron. Ben wanted to figure it out. And just a couple weeks ago, after a bunch of digging, he did figure out who the secret journalist was and published a scoop in Semaphore. It was a journalist named Steven Adler, editor in chief of Reuters for years. He now runs the center for Ethics and Journalism at nyu.

[C]

Honestly, had I thought for a minute and just tried to guess, who would I hire to conduct a review very, very, very carefully, painstakingly, fairly with somebody who is obsessed with journalistic standards? Steven Adler's the guy.

[A]

Ben didn't say whether he trusted Stephen Adler's review more or Jeff Gerth's. But as the conclusions of these two reviews show, there is clearly not agreement on how journalists should think about and go about reexamining narratives that maybe don't hold up. And by even doing that kind of review in the first place, the Pulitzer board accidentally opened themselves up to a lawsuit from the president. So what's the state of the lawsuit now against the Pulitzers?

[C]

So most defamation lawsuits don't survive a motion to dismiss and go away very quickly.

[A]

Not this one, though. The Pulitzer board filed a motion to dismiss the case, which, like Ben said, is usually successful in a defamation suit because the First Amendment gives a very strong defense against defamation of public officials like the president. But the judge in the Florida county where Trump filed the suit, Okeechobee county, which seemingly is just a random county, by the way, where his lawyers thought he'd get a friendly jury, it's not where Mar A Lago is. The judge denied the Pulitzer board's motion and let the case go into its next stage, which means the board has had to start turning over documents, emails, sending for depositions, and preparing for trial. I was texting with my buddy who's a media lawyer this morning who, like, hadn't really paid close attention to it, just saying, we were going to talk about this. And he started reading it, and he was just texting me furiously, like, this is bonkers. This is crazy. I can't believe this. Just really tearing his hair out that it survived the motion to dismiss.

[C]

Yeah, I think media lawyers find it pretty disturbing because some of the consequences are pretty weird. If it turns out if somebody asks you if you're awarded a prize correctly, and you say, screw you, we did, you're fine. But if you say, you know what? That's a really good question. I want to hire a very high integrity, experienced person to review and make sure we did a good job. Then you get sued. Like, that's a bad incentive.

[A]

As of yesterday, this case looks like it could now become even more consequential. A Florida court rejected an appeal by the Pulitzer board that was trying again to get the case thrown out. And in the decision, one of the judges, Judge Ed R. To, went on a tirade against one of the foundational Supreme Court decisions that protects journalism in America, Times v. Sullivan, saying that the Supreme Court in 1964 decided that case incorrectly. He quotes the term fake news, all caps in the ruling. There's a growing movement on the right to challenge Times v. Sullivan and get it overturned, similar to the way Roe v. Wade was overturned, which, if that were to happen, would make it much easier for public officials to win defamation suits against journalists. It'd be a devastating decision for journalism, frankly. In the last 24 hours, it looks like the Pulitzer suit has been thrust into that movement. The Pulitzer board said yesterday in a statement this lawsuit is about intimidation of the press and those who support it, and we will not be intimidated. The Pulitzer board will continue to recognize the accomplishments of journalists, writers, artists and composers at the highest level. We look forward to continuing our defense of journalism. If journalism is the first draft of history, then journalism awards are too. They're a record of the times, a snapshot of a moment, even if later that flattering prose about Stalin doesn't age so well. The New York Times and Washington Post and others have of course continued to report on Trump and Russia, including on Mueller's findings and the lack of evidence of a conspiracy. In that way, reporting is self correcting, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't imagine, try to imagine that there might be a way to address the issue Ben feels has raised by Trump's lawsuit. Some approach journalists could agree on broadly as an industry that would thread the needle between not wanting to give in to a pissed off president who's on a legal campaign against the press for stories that are factual, while finding a way to reckon more directly with the public about how the pursuit of those stories may have left them with a skewed impression.

[C]

I mean, I think it would be valuable if the institutions that wrote about this stuff were able to reevaluate the story and to say in some clearer way, here's what we got right, here's what we got wrong. And in the context of the narrative really, because I think this isn't actually about were there factual errors, it's about what really is the deal with Trump's relationship with Russia. What really is the deal with Russia's interference in elections, which I think is clearer now than was then, that they were kind of very interested in sowing chaos and backing parties on the right and the far left across Europe and North America, that in a way they didn't require coordination, but they were just sort of like trying to make trouble and saw Trump from their perspective as a vehicle for trouble more than the kind of conspiracy people imagined. I think part of the answer is that journalistic institutions and journalists ought to be more open to self examination. But of course the other is that we should take ourselves a little less seriously. Like when people say that they write the first draft of history, they like to put the stress on the word history, but really it should be on the first draft. And you know, there are. Journalism isn't the final arbiter of truth. It's the first crack at it.

[A]

Yeah, that's helpful. It's like if we put the emphasis on the first draft part, it might be a little easier for us to say we got it wrong or we weren't exactly right, or whether we were

[C]

only seeing a little part of the picture.

[A]

That's ben smith from semaphore media. We originally aired that story in February of 2025. Since then, as I mentioned at the top, two of the judges who allowed Trump's suit to proceed have been nominated by Trump for lifetime appointments. The Pulitzer board, meanwhile, has been using the case to try and extract information from Donald Trump that he has long tried to avoid sharing. They're demanding that he turn over his tax returns, information about his financial holdings, as well as his medical and psychological records. It's possible the president has opened up a can of worms that he does not want crawling out by filing this suit. We'll see how it plays out. Today's episode was produced by me with help from Sam Egan and edited by Jen Kinney. Our show is made by Executive Producer Robin Simeon, Managing Editor Kevin Sullivan, producer Zach St. Louis and associate producer Kevin Shepard, along with Contributing Editor Neil Drumming. Fact checking by Annika Robbins, sound design by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McGinley. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seiple, Tejal Algemera, Natalie Hill and Jennifer Farrow. Special thanks to Nancy Updake. See you.

[C]

Foreign.

[F]

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