Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate.

Joining me is Jeff Girt, journalist who spent three decades as an investigative reporter at the New York Times, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

His new four-part series about U.S. media's Russiagate coverage in the Columbia Journalism Review is called The Press

versus the President. Jeff Gert, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, Aaron.

You've written an exhaustive expose of how the U.S. media covered Russia Gate, and your

findings are not very flattering. You document a pattern of major U.S.

outlets, especially the Washington Post and the New York Times, reporting innuendo about Trump

and Russia and then ignoring the countervailing facts, even when those facts emerge publicly that directly contradict

what the Post and the Times reported before.

Before we get into your findings, I'm just curious to hear more about your journalistic background.

As I mentioned, you spent decades at the times and how you came to write this piece,

why you felt this was important to put

out there sure uh well i've been a reporter for a little over 50 years started out as a freelance reporter

now here at the end of my career i'm i'm a freelance, but the bulk of the time, as you point out, was at the New York Times.

And then I left the Times in the end of 2005, I spent a couple of years doing a book, and then I worked at ProPublica for nine years. And since then,

I've been a freelance reporter. The impetus for the project is basically twofold. One,

after I left ProPublica, I did a fellowship with the University of Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

And one of the projects I did there involved dissecting and trying to report out the dossier, the infamous Steele dossier.

And in the course of doing that with someone else there,

I became pretty skeptical about the dossier and was unable to verify much of it,

if any of it.

So that sort of planted in me some seeds about the story itself as it was unfolding

...