The leftwing online “news” outlet Buzzfeed disgraced itself by publishing a widely discredited document making unsubstantiated charges against President–elect Donald Trump, purporting to tie Mr. Trump to compromising information that the Russian government had allegedly collected on him. The allegations regurgitated by Buzzfeed came from a “dossier” which, Buzzfeed said on its site, was “compiled by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official.” The site tried to cover itself with a warning: “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.” Buzzfeed’s own editor, Ben Smith, admitted that he has “serious reason to doubt the allegations” in it. Nevertheless, Buzzfeed went ahead and published the unverified allegations with the flimsy rationale “that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” Ben Smith tried to put lipstick on his pig by claiming that “publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.” If the job of reporters is to knowingly publish completely unsubstantiated, sensationalist stories whose only “value” is to further polarize the country, the media are in big trouble. Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly,” which Gallup has been polling since 1972, will continue to hit new lows.
CNN amplified the false story by giving prominent attention to it on the air, without the warning it was unsubstantiated and contained errors that even Buzzfeed published. In fact, CNN described the source for the story as “credible.” Subsequently, CNN lamely tried to defend its reporting, instead of apologizing for running with a story that even the New York Times described as “a summary of unsubstantiated reports.” And then, in an attempt to change the subject, CNN conducted what it called a “reality check” of claims that Mr. Trump made during his news conference on January 11th . In the process, they ended up doing even more damage to their own credibility. For example, CNN critiqued Mr. Trump’s claim that “I have no deals in Russia.” Note that he spoke in the present tense and said that he has no deals in Russia, meaning actual completed commercial agreements currently in effect. CNN tried to refute this claim as “misleading” by themselves misleadingly pointing to a deal he had been negotiating in 2013, with a Russian billionaire, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Even CNN admitted this approximately 4-year-old negotiation was never finalized. CNN even reached way back to 1987 when Mr. Trump “visited the Soviet Union with his first wife, Ivana, and announced plans to develop a luxury hotel there.” Of course, whatever the president-elect, his family or his company may have tried to do in Russia years ago, or said in the past about business prospects in Russia, has no relevance to whether his claim that “I have no deals in Russia” today is true.