9/28/2023 0 Comments Russian dossier proven rightJust in case you’ve forgotten, Roger Stone (lying under oath to Congress), Paul Manafort (bank and tax fraud) and Michael Flynn (lying under penalty of perjury to the FBI) were all convicted of federal crimes and were all pardoned or had their sentences commuted by a self-serving Trump. Some of the gravamen of the dossier, though, is, in retrospect, right on target: people in the Trump campaign did knowingly work with the Russian government or its agents to discredit the Clinton campaign, Trump’s campaign manager and his first national security adviser did have improper contact with Russian interests. What we are debating (worth reading the subhed) And the story included a two-sentence subhed, the second sentence of which was, “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.” Much of what the dossier contains, in fact, turned out not to be true-the “pee tape,” the Michael Cohen trip to Prague (although Christopher Steele, rather remarkably, still insists that part is true), other details. ” That’s an accurate summary of the dossier. The actual headline was “ These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia. Such a story would likely have borne a headline like “Trump Sex Tape Said to Fuel Possible Russian Blackmail,” and its publication would have been a black mark on the record of any editor, especially as it now seems possible that this particular tale was the creation of a Democratic-funded disinformation effort against Trump.īut that wasn’t the headline on the BuzzFeed story. If it had been an enterprise story, the issue of whether to publish should have centered around whether the story was accurate. The Steele Dossier wasn’t a reported scoop-it was a leaked document. Now, with much of the dossier discredited, I still think BuzzFeed made the right call, and I want to explain why. When BuzzFeed decided to publish the Steele Dossier on Trump’s ostensible Russian connections almost five years ago, I was one of relatively few people in journalism who defended the decision.
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