The indictments of Michael Sussman and Igor Danchenko have led to grudging concessions by at least some of the left-wing media that, well, perhaps, maybe there wasn’t much “there” to the endlessly hyped allegations that Donald Trump is a marionette on the strings of Vladimir Putin. The hangout is modified and limited, of course. As David Harsanyi says,
While the Washington Post “corrected” some of its discredited reporting on the [Steele] dossier, removing portions of reporting connecting former president Donald Trump to Russia, there has been virtually no other accountability. And really, it’s become modus operandi for the news organizations to “correct” stories in which the entire premise is false. Any sort of “reckoning” would mean a retraction, followed up by investigative deep dives, not only reporting the problems with the story themselves, but outing the fraudulent sources who participated in the deception. Perhaps that’s going on as we speak, but it’s highly doubtful.
Those who perpetuated the Russia collusion deception – and this means editors and pundits, not only reporters – still hold premier jobs in political media. Many, in fact, have been rewarded with better gigs. Is anyone at the Washington Post or New York Times going to return a Pulitzer? Is anyone going to explain how multiple alleged independent sources regularly buttressed the central fabulistic claim of the dossier? Journalism is ostensibly about transparency and truth, and yet not one of these sentinels of democracy has explained how they were supposedly fooled for years, exhibiting not a modicum of skepticism – one of the most vital components of good journalism. When asked by Axios about the Steele dossier, the two outlets that churned out some of the most sensationalistic and conspiratorial content of the Trump era, CNN and MSNBC, wouldn’t even comment.
Matt Taibbi foresees a “whitewash” of the media’s Russia falsehoods. A handful of scapegoats – “a combination of Danchenko, Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith, and perhaps a few organizations like McClatchy” – will be ritualistically stoned and driven into the wilderness (quietly returning after a few news cycles have passed), while the rest of the hoax purveyors insist that, even though they may have been wrong to mistake Clinton campaign disinformation for credible intelligence, the mistake was understandable. Mr. Taibbi summarizes the extenuating circumstances proffered by Bill Grueskin, former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, in a New York Times op-ed:
Grueskin then listed a slew of reasons press figures chased Russiagate/Steele phantoms. First, “Mr. Trump had long curried Mr. Putin’s favor.” Second, “the Russians interfered… to foment dissent and unrest.” Third, “Trump’s choice of Paul Manafort to serve as his campaign chairman reinforced the idea that he was in the thrall of Russia.” Fourth: “Many of the denials came from confirmed liars… When a well-known liar tells you that something is false, the instinct is to believe that it might well be true.” Fifth: “Some reporters simply didn’t like or trust Mr. Trump or didn’t want to appear to be on his side.”
No big deal, just an Ivy League J-school Dean offering excuse after excuse for reporters who couldn’t bring themselves to tell the truth during the biggest scandal of the Trump years, because they “didn’t want to appear to be on his side.” He should be saying any journalist who’s too afraid of peer pressure to do his or her job should go into a new line of work. Apparently, Dean Grueskin favors a more forgiving approach to ethics.
What is most fatal to such excuse mongering, though, is the Steele Dossier’s lack of credibility ab initio. The dossier’s thesis was that Russia labored mightily to get Donald Trump elected President. Its purported sources for that information and for other damaging revelations about Trump’s bad conduct and subservience to Russian interests were – Russian government insiders.
Trusting Steele’s self-contradictory concoction required not suspending disbelief but hanging it by the neck until dead. A more plausible hypothesis was that Russia wanted the predictable, pliant Hillary Clinton elected instead of the impulsive, ego-driven Donald Trump and spread rumors designed to aid her. (My “counterfactual history” novella about the election posits a variation on the theme.) The “Democratic operatives with bylines” naturally didn’t want to suggest that. They buried disbelief in a deep grave and warned the world that Donald Trump was a real life Manchurian candidate. To quote David Harsanyi again:
The most charitable explanation is that reporters had become such saps for Democrats that they were inclined to believe the most fantastical stories imaginable. The more plausible explanation, considering the lack of any genuine accountability and self-reflection, is that they were in on it.
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