I don’t think this is an indictment of the media at all. I never saw this material discussed anywhere except in the middle of a forest of qualifications about it being “unconfirmed” or “unproven.” That’s the right way to cover it. No one reading those stories had any business thinking these allegations were proven. I doubt many did.<p>It’s also intrinsically a lot harder for <i>any</i> US news organization to investigate these allegations (which concern private events in Russia!) than it is for them to investigate Gary Hart’s infidelity.<p>It seems like the appropriate way to handle potentially significant but extremely difficult or impossible to verify allegations is to note that they are unverified.<p>I suspect this isn’t going to be a popular opinion here bc people love to crap on “the media,” but imperfect as they are they are the best and frequently only source for important information as it is happening in real time.
> That prompted a statement promising further examination from The Journal and something far more significant from The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee. She took a step that is almost unheard-of: removing large chunks of erroneous articles from 2017 and 2019, as well as an offending video.<p>This is why archive.org and its ilk are now more important than ever before. We can’t allow history to be erased like this in the name of saving face.
This opinion piece casually makes the very bold claim that the Steele Dossier has been disproven now, though the only evidence they seem to provide is that one of the informants has been arrested for lying to the FBI. I have not heard of any evidence that has directly contradicted the dossier, and in fact, I've seen a handful of news stories where other internet commenters have noticed that the timelines discovered from current investigations have matched up with pieces of the dossier.<p>What parts have been disproven, exactly?
Check out the Talk page for the Steele Dossier on Wikipedia [1]. A bunch of wiki knights have taken it upon themselves to weasel-word the article to make it appear as if the dossier is still almost exclusively factual, which we now of course know it is not.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Steele_dossier" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Steele_dossier</a>
The media occasionally sort of becomes unhinged and only talking to itself. It's hard to attribute why this happened but effectively the consequences is that journalistic ethics standards go out the window. This almost always results in people dying. This kind of behaviour is what starts wars or gets politicians assassinated.<p>Since this is NYT I'll use an example from NYT.<p>January 2017: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-...</a><p>Ok fair. NYtimes reporting that phones got tapped. Not exactly a surprise given snowden and how easy it is to get such data. Almost 100% this article is true.<p>March 2017: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/us/politics/trump-obama-tap-phones.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/us/politics/trump-obama-t...</a><p>Wait... trump isn't offering the Nytimes their own article? Only months later? By the same author? Does Michael S Schmidt smoke a ton of weed and forgot he himself wrote the article explaining it?<p>So the fact checkers come down and clearly show Schmidt his article saying he must retract?<p><a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/mar/16/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-he-learned-obama-tapped-his-phon/" rel="nofollow">https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/mar/16/donald-tru...</a><p>Oh no. Fact checkers kind of got this one wrong.<p>My point... it isn't about facts. Journalistic standard #1 is honesty. They clearly broke the most important rule.<p>It goes further: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spygate_(conspiracy_theory)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spygate_(conspiracy_theory)</a><p>It's a conspiracy theory! Not only is it false...<p>This is the media falling from journalistic standards. Every single time in history where the media does this, people die. In the USA, the last major time the media did this, Mckinley got assassinated.
Most of this reads like a justification. Even the title "...get [it] so wrong" makes it sound like it just happened to them (the media). Trust in media in the US is at an all time low that didn't just happen. US mainstream media is utterly useless for any topic that's politicized somehow yet other topics don't suffer from this decline in usefulness. I might not be able to point a finger at the exact place where the problem lies but the problem is there and its not "just happening". A Justification why it "happened" is the exact opposite of what has to be done to fix this.
I tend to defer to Marcy Wheeler when it comes to evaluating this stuff; she spends a lot of time actually looking at primary source material (court filings, etc.), AND she called out the dossier as likely Russian disinformation back in 2017.<p><a href="https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/01/11/the-democrats-newfound-love-for-russian-intelligence-product/" rel="nofollow">https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/01/11/the-democrats-newfound...</a> (2017)<p><a href="https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1460514005672419328" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1460514005672419328</a><p><a href="https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/11/12/source-6a-john-durhams-twitter-charges/" rel="nofollow">https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/11/12/source-6a-john-durhams...</a>
Essentially after 2016 you should treat New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream press as partisan actors. If they publish something negative about Biden, it's probably true. If it's something negative about Trump, republicans or anyone right of center, it's most likely partisan attack. The difference between op-ed and news is also blurry and frankly should be mostly ignored - selective reporting is a thing.<p>It's a sad state of thing but here we are.
Well, the wish is father to the thought. Connoisseurs of this sort of thing may remember that St. Martin's Press chickened out at the last minute and did not publish a book stating that the Bush boys had had a business flying drugs in from South America. It sounded implausible to me, but apparently not if you were zealous enough. Anyway, the publisher decided that it didn't want to risk the outcome of the lawsuit that would certainly have been brought.
I wish we could get some journalistic analysis about 2016 news orgs overcovering Trump & insuring his primary win.<p>Specifically, what they're going to change to insure they aren't so trivially manipulated next time.
A simple lack of journalistic vigour in fact-checking.<p>Many of us (and most of were no fans of Trump, either) could see that Russiagate was straight out absolutely laughable unsubstantiated bullshit.<p>But the media had an agenda and so the US has spent five wasted years when that time, money and effort could have been spent on far more useful stuff.
The saddest part are the brainwashed in discussions repeating talking points from the mainstream without thinking, and calling everyone else crazy. Then echoing themselves with podcasts and etc that repeat the same talking points and opinions<p>No doubt the mainstream media keeps reaching new lows, supported by the fact checkers, and the big tech censorship<p>But they will not learn anything... The current mainstream coverage of the Rittenhouse case is just surreal, and the opinion segments are disgusting
For those who take this headline as an indictment of the trump-Russia affair, keep in mind the article content actually goes on to explain that the many many non-dossier related instances of sketchiness was a big factor in some reporters taking the dossier too seriously.<p>“ The first problem was this: There is no doubt that Mr. Trump had long curried Mr. Putin’s favor and that he and his family were eager to do business in Russia. Moreover, Mr. Mueller showed, and filed indictments that explained, how the Russians interfered in the 2016 campaign by targeting voter-registration systems, hacking into Democrats’ emails and taking advantage of Facebook and other social media companies to foment dissent and unrest.<p>Mr. Trump’s choice of Paul Manafort to serve as his campaign chairman reinforced the idea that he was in the thrall of Russia. Those fears were borne out when a bipartisan Senate committee found Mr. Manafort to be a “grave counterintelligence threat” because of his ties to a Kremlin agent. So, given all those connections, it was easy to assume that the dossier’s allegations must also be true.”<p>Likewise, the article does put the dossier reporting issues in perspective stating:<p>” None of this should minimize the endemic and willful deceptions of the right-wing press. From Fox News’s downplaying of the Covid-19 threat to OAN’s absurd defense of Mr. Trump’s lies about the election, conservative media outlets have built their own echo chamber, to the detriment of the country.”
This story is much larger than the Steele dossier, and it's a story that augurs a lot of trouble for the US.<p>For starters, Trumpers have not forgotten and will not forget this. That's 30% of the US populations with an intense anger towards the whole Steele story. The Steele dossier was debunked years ago by anyone who followed the story with a modicum of balance - like the late Stephen F Cohen pointed out, how likely is it that Trump, a hotelier, wouldn't be fully aware that top suites at the top hotels in world capitals aren't bugged to high heaven? Why would a pee pee tape embarrass Trump, the personification of the old dictum: "No publicity is bad publicity"?<p>Then, there is the issue of media credibility. Media credibility is already at all time low. We've known for years that the Steele dossier had been rejected because major media outlets realized it was probably bunk. This will further this decline in trust and cement American's media polarization.<p>Also, Trump followers know there is a long list of other immoral/illegal/dishonest assaults on his presidency (no, not including the "Big Lie"). They are seething mad, and <i>they are growing</i> in numbers, recruiting even among ethnic minorities.<p>On the other side, there is a 30% hardcore never-Trump group that has many reasons to be grieved by Trump. Trump's mistreatment of muslim countries was shocking (although, every muslim I know voted for Trump). The environment and pandering to Big Oil.<p>I've tried to write this as balanced as possible because, I see a great danger from my vantage point that of a Latin American immigrant from a country that went through a savage four (or was it forty?) year civil war. It doesn't end well, and our current media should be sacrificed for peace and to air out the laundry.<p>America, you've conjured a very nasty demon you have no experience with.
> They can also scrutinize whether, by focusing so heavily on the dossier, they helped distract public attention from Mr. Trump’s actual misconduct.<p>Focusing on the questionable Steele dossier seemed to be a fairly effective anti-Trump strategy in the short run at least, but perhaps in hindsight the media can reflect on whether a focus on actual misconduct might have been a better approach overall.
The Russian government was working to help trump win, that is a fact, and Trump welcomed it. Trump then showed he was at best trivially manipulated by Putin as president and his campaign manager had literally been giving Russia polling data.<p>Obsessing over the Russia dossier which wasn’t the basis for this investigation and discounting the whole trump Russia thing is like saying sequoia National forest doesn’t exist because one of the trees turned out to be a cell tower.<p>Edit: many downvotes without logical replies, actually without any replies at the moment, shows this comment is making people experience inconvenient truths, which they must cancel. Long live the cancel culture, am I right?