Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, more than 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Erik Wemple, Washington Post media critic
On Feb. 19, the American political website the Hill released a belated assessment of a series of columns published by the conservative political commentator John Solomon. The columns in question had an overwhelming impact on events in Ukraine that ultimately led to the U.S. impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
Media critic Erik Wemple wrote in the Washington Post that, rather than taking full responsibility for Solomon’s Ukraine stories, The Hill punted.
“There would be no retraction of Solomon’s columns, no acknowledgment of the dishonesty that produced them, no disciplinary actions announced,” Wemple said.
Fourteen columns that Solomon published beginning in March 2019 relied on misinformation fed to the columnist by Trump associates. They had astounding influence, granting credibility to the Trump administration’s conspiracy-based policy in Ukraine. Arguably none of the ensuing events, culminating in the impeachment inquiry, would have occurred without them.
Solomon advanced the false claims that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election to undermine Trump. He said that former Vice President Joseph Biden called for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor general as a favor for his son’s employer, private energy company Burisma. He also lied that that U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch openly spoke out against Trump.
In Wemple’s assessment, The Hill’s tepid response to Solomon’s pieces is far short of the rebuttal they deserve.
He writes that, while in one sense The Hill “acted with transparency and credibility” by conducting a review of Solomon’s columns and publicly releasing the results, “on another level, it allowed a concerted political campaign by a former employee to go unretracted.”
Wemple’s assessment is balanced and correct, which is why he is Ukraine’s friend of the week. If there are any shortcomings in his commentary, it is that he doesn’t go far enough in condemning The Hill’s decision to publish Solomon’s misinformation in the first place.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Bob Cusack, chief editor of The Hill
The review of John Solomon’s pieces itself, conducted under the supervision of Bob Cusack, chief editor of The Hill, is a revealing study in the consequences of dishonest journalism and editorial missteps.
The text opens by stating that the review was announced on Nov. 18, 2019 “after State Department diplomats criticized several of those columns during House impeachment hearings.”
The decision to conduct the review only after government officials publicly criticized Solomon’s falsehoods is in itself astounding – much of the columns’ contents had been dunked and their sources were widely known to lack credibility well before publication.
Yuriy Lutsenko – the former Ukrainian prosecutor general who provided the foundation for Solomon’s claim that Yovanovitch had passed on a “do not prosecute list” to Ukrainian justice officials – has long faced accusations of corruption and been known to Ukrainians and the U.S. State Department as an unreliable figure.
Lev Parnas, a central player working with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Guiliani to dig up dirt in Ukraine, was another key source for Solomon. He was later arrested in connection with a scheme to direct foreign funds to U.S. politicians and influence relations with Ukraine more than a month before The Hill announced its review.
When Solomon identified Parnas to The Hill as someone with business interests in Ukraine, the Hill pushed back, saying it “did not want columns to rely on an individual whose background and motives were unclear.” But the report then states that The Hill reframed Parnas as a “facilitator… helping arrange contacts in Ukraine,” changing the description of Parnas’ role, but not his actual function.
The report continues to qualify that Solomon’s columns were opinion pieces, rather than reported stories, calling that the source of potential confusion.
That may be the most galling assertion of all. Opinion content that incorporates reporting is nothing new in journalism. But publications must hold columns to the same factual and ethical standards as news.
As Wemple notes in the Washington Post, journalists manage to “blend news reporting and opinion without launching false narratives about Ukraine” every day.
Cusack’s missteps in publishing Solomon should be remembered as a textbook worst-case-scenario of editorial negligence. The belated, lukewarm disavowal issued by The Hill only reinforces that argument. For this reason, Cusack is Ukraine’s foe of the week.
