The right became too credulous and the mainstream press too timid.
The parallel was striking—but perhaps no one wanted to see it.
Last week, corruption allegations that underpinned the House GOP’s push to impeach President Joe Biden collapsed after federal prosecutors charged Alexander Smirnov, the informant who’d brought them forward, with lying to the FBI.
The Biden impeachment was never about the substance of the allegations against him; it was revenge for what former President Donald Trump’s allies view as witch hunts against him. After Trump was impeached twice, Republicans were always going to search for some cause to impeach Biden—preferably one that involved just the kind of untoward foreign dealings of which Trump was accused.
Instead, the conservative media and House Republicans seem to have blundered into their own version of the Steele dossier, the infamous collection of allegations against Trump gathered before the 2016 election. Both stories involve dubious dealings in the hall of mirrors that is the former Soviet Union, an FBI informant with sketchy intelligence ties, and accusations that Russian intelligence planted false information. And in both cases, the underlying information has proved to be effectively bunk.
David A. Graham: Collusion happened
Seven years on, the ways the Steele dossier broke the American press are still becoming clear. The conservative media rightly pilloried many mainstream and liberal outlets for publishing the dossier or for taking the claims in it too seriously. Yet when Smirnov came around, the same outlets were eager to gin up an impeachment based on his clearly flimsy claims. Meanwhile, the mainstream media have become more cautious about publishing information from questionable sources—sometimes overly cautious, leading it to treat legitimate information from Hunter Biden’s laptop as presumptively false.
The Steele dossier was named for Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who compiled a bunch of unverified allegations involving Trump for an opposition-research firm working for Democrats during the 2016 election. Its allegations included conventional wisdom (Russia was responsible for a hack of Democratic National Committee emails), speculation (about the roles of Trump aides as liaisons to the Kremlin), and salacious nonsense (pee tape, anyone?). Steele’s résumé and reputation for intelligence connections granted the document credence it might not otherwise have received. The dossier circulated among journalists in Washington but wasn’t reported until January 10, 2017, 10 days before Trump’s inauguration, when CNN disclosed its existence but not its content. Later that day, BuzzFeed published the dossier itself.
I was highly critical of BuzzFeed’s decision from the very start. Most important, BuzzFeed was publishing a set of highly damaging claims without verifying them. In fact, it had already debunked parts. When it published the document, the outlet noted, “It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors.” Then–editor in chief Ben Smith explained his decision to publish the document by saying, “Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers. We have always erred on the side of publishing … Publishing the dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”
This was a complete abdication of a reporter’s responsibility to “get the truth and print it,” as the publisher John S. Knight put it. BuzzFeed not only hadn’t gotten the truth; it was saying that whatever the truth was didn’t matter. Smith continues to defend his choice. I continue to be unconvinced. If anything, the decision has been even more disastrous than I worried at the time.
Ben Smith: After all that, I still would publish the dossier
Once the dossier was public, many mainstream organizations eagerly covered it. Even when noting that claims were unverified, they spent lots of time and space discussing those claims, granting them attention and status they didn’t merit. The Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple has carefully documented many examples of outlets that covered the document too credulously. His own newspaper has removed large portions of articles based on it.
Many on the right also criticized the decision to publish the document. As reporters dug into the Steele dossier, its claims fell apart. One immediate effect was to warp public expectations for Trump investigations, so that even though it became clear that Trump aides colluded with foreign governments, the inability to match the most lurid claims undercut the impact of any findings. Some experts believe that the dossier may have been laced with false claims planted by Russian intelligence to sow chaos.
The whole thing left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. On the right, in keeping with Trump’s own impulses, a desire for vengeance eclipsed the prudent warnings about hasty publication. When Smirnov emerged, the right-wing press embraced him. Like Steele, he had a history of working with U.S. law-enforcement agencies, connections in Eastern Europe, and some explosive allegations. In 2020, Smirnov told an FBI handler that the Ukrainian gas company Burisma had paid millions of dollars in bribes to Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who served for a time on Burisma’s board despite having had little experience in Ukraine or in natural gas. That became central to efforts to impeach the president, which were fanned by conservative media.
This week, Smirnov was charged with lying to the FBI by David Weiss, a special counsel investigating Hunter Biden, who was originally appointed U.S. attorney by Trump. The Biden impeachment appears to be on its last legs. The inquiry’s champions in the conservative press are still embarrassingly clinging to the story. Had they followed their own advice about avoiding dodgy dossiers, they wouldn’t have to.
But if right-wing media forgot the lesson, the mainstream press may have overlearned it. As I warned in 2021, “Carefully vetted stories will be rejected by partisans who will haul up the haste to post a damaging dossier as proof that no reporting can really be trusted.” When documents began circulating in 2020 that allegedly came from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, many reporters dismissed them out of hand, treating them as likely disinformation or Russian propaganda. (Twitter infamously blocked tweets about the laptop, a decision that executives later said they regretted.) The press was right not to take the documents at face value, especially given their mysterious provenance and the integral role of Rudy Giuliani, who would become a prodigious source of bunkum following the 2020 presidential election. But they were wrong to dismiss them entirely rather than carefully reviewing them—which would have shown that the material was real.
The Steele dossier’s damage to the press is visible across the political spectrum. With Americans polarized by party and by news consumption, media outlets may struggle to break out of their reflexive postures. And fears about disinformation guarantee both that scurrilous stories will emerge and that some journalists will be reflexively skeptical even when that’s unwarranted. What was easy to break will be much harder to fix.
How the Steele Dossier Broke the Media
6
0
26.02.2024
The right became too credulous and the mainstream press too timid.
The parallel was striking—but perhaps no one wanted to see it.
Last week, corruption allegations that underpinned the House GOP’s push to impeach President Joe Biden collapsed after federal prosecutors charged Alexander Smirnov, the informant who’d brought them forward, with lying to the FBI.
The Biden impeachment was never about the substance of the allegations against him; it was revenge for what former President Donald Trump’s allies view as witch hunts against him. After Trump was impeached twice, Republicans were always going to search for some cause to impeach Biden—preferably one that involved just the kind of untoward foreign dealings of which Trump was accused.
Instead, the conservative media and House Republicans seem to have blundered into their own version of the Steele dossier, the infamous collection of allegations against Trump gathered before the 2016 election. Both stories involve dubious dealings in the hall of mirrors that is the former Soviet Union, an FBI informant with sketchy intelligence ties, and accusations that Russian intelligence planted false information. And in both cases, the underlying information has proved to be effectively bunk.
David A. Graham: Collusion happened
Seven years on, the ways the Steele dossier broke the American press are still becoming clear. The conservative media rightly pilloried many mainstream and liberal outlets for publishing the dossier or for taking the claims in it too seriously. Yet when Smirnov came around, the same outlets were eager to gin up an impeachment based on his clearly flimsy claims. Meanwhile, the mainstream media have become more cautious about publishing information from questionable sources—sometimes overly cautious, leading it to treat........
© The Atlantic
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
