One could imagine the unraveling of the initial credulous hysteria around the dossier among them. (Even more so since the rise of social media.) While the afterlife of the dossier has been chronicled by a few media folks–including Erik Wemple of the Post and writers Marcy Wheeler, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté–it has, until very recently, been largely shrugged off outside of the conservative press.įor decades, I’ve followed media screw-up scrums, the pile-ons that tend to follow the embarrassments of big-name reporters and newsrooms. Implicated, too, is the rest of the media commentariat, who until recently have kept relatively quiet about these failures. The Post was just the first out of the gate others will almost certainly follow. Smith is now the scoop-machine media columnist for the Times, putting that newspaper at the center of a bit of Trump weirdness its reporters had previously managed to avoid. And to Ben Smith, whose decision to publish the document in its entirety while editor of BuzzFeed News kicked off the whole mess. “It’s rare for a publication to make wholesale changes after publication and to republish the edited story, especially more than four years afterward,” Paul Farhi wrote.īut the collapse of the dossier’s credibility goes beyond the Post, to Mother Jones and the Wall Street Journal, to ABC and CNN, among others. The Post also published a news story about its decision. As a result, portions of two Post stories about the dossier and a video were removed, and an editor’s note was attached noting, in one case, that reporting in the story had been contradicted by a federal indictment and “undermined by further reporting by The Washington Post. Six months into the tenure of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee the Post has admitted publicly that key reporting on one of the biggest stories of the Trump years was wrong.Īt issue was the 35-page “dossier,” first published by BuzzFeed News in January 2017, which aired murky intelligence gathering that showed nefarious links between Donald Trump and Russia.Ī federal indictment and two investigations into the dossier have severely undermined it, and the Post was forced to acknowledge that a man it named as a source for the document was, in fact, not. ![]() ![]() In some other media climate, the Washington Post ’s decision to correct and remove chunks of its coverage of the Steele dossier last week would have been seismic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |