From a review of New York Times veteran Barry Meier's "Spooked":
Meier, a two-time Polk award winner who was also part of a team that won a Pulitzer in 2017, is the first mainstream press figure to break the industry omerta over the reporting failures of Russiagate. That Spooked is an important book can be judged by the nervous reaction to it. Though the Times did publish an excerpt and a review by William Cohan, and the Wall Street Journal commended him for saying “what hardly anyone else in his circle of elite mainstream journalists has had the courage to say,” much of the rest of the business has looked askance. This reveals how much industry discomfort remains about the Steele story, still treated by media critics as a minor fender-bender and not the epic crackup Spooked describes. ...
Much of the point of Meier’s book is that there can be no such thing as “journalism for rent,” because the mere act of putting information up for sale corrupts the process [Fuison GPS co-founder Glenn] Simpson claims to love. As Meier put it to me, “People who think of themselves as journalists and rent out those talents are no longer journalists.”
Meier, who’s done years of hard investigative work about the likes of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, is clearly an old-school reporter who belongs to a time when the journalist’s worst nightmare was to be caught getting something wrong. Spooked seethes against Simpson, [Fusion co-founder Peter] Fritsch, and their enablers for their massive (and ongoing) outrage against the reporter’s code. Meier is no friend of Trump and isn’t trying to be in this book, but he’s done a great service to journalism by reminding colleagues what the job is supposed to be, and what it can’t be, if it becomes too willing to be seduced by “rented” truth.
