Chuck Todd led a wall-to-wall discussion on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” It included commentary on whether the Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke had jumped the gun at a campaign stop on Friday when he said: “This is an unprecedented attack on this country and on our democracy, and we are owed the facts. And if we do not receive them, 243 years in, there’s nothing that guarantees us a 244th.”
On “Fox News Sunday,” the program hosted by Chris Wallace, Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, said the president had been proved right in repeatedly saying “no collusion.” On the same show, Mr. Nadler called for the release of the entire report and its underlying materials.
Also in the morning hours, on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” the host Brian Stelter asked of whether reporters and talking heads had inflated expectations.
He seemed to be reacting to an analytical article posted online on Saturday by the Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, who wrote that the lack of new charges emerging from the report “is a deathblow for the reputation of the American news media.” Mr. Taibbi cited instances of overreaching by some reporters and pundits to make his case.
Mr. Stelter pushed back against that view. “Don’t be fooled by the partisans who cherry-pick the worst mistakes of individual journalists or the craziest ideas from commentators and claim that’s the entire media,” he said.
The problem, Mr. Stelter said, lay in the competing interests of “agenda-driven columnists” and “journalists who report the news.” He put Joy-Ann Reid, of MSNBC, and Jesse Watters, of Fox News, in the agenda-driven camp. Then he rolled a clip of Ms. Reid suggesting that Mr. Barr may have an interest in covering up the facts; and another of Mr. Watters characterizing the Mueller report as “a knockout blow to the Democrats and the press who say, ‘Collusion, collusion, collusion.’”
The Nixon-era reporting led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post seemed newly exceptional, now that Mr. Mueller’s work was done. Mr. Bernstein, a CNN contributor who was a guest on Mr. Stelter’s show, praised recent coverage of President Trump and the allegations that have surrounded him. He singled out the journalism of The Wall Street Journal — owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation — as a sign that democracy was working.
Noting its assiduously reported articles on Mr. Trump, Mr. Bernstein said, “It ought to be stressed that the same owner of Fox News published these stories in his paper.”
