Townhall - Columnists - David Harsanyi
OPINION
There Will Be No Media 'Reckoning' Over the Steele Dossier
David Harsanyi | Posted: Nov 19, 2021 12:01 AM
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Axios says there's a "reckoning" in the media over coverage of the Steele dossier after the partisan oppo document's primary source was charged with lying to the FBI. "It's one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history," writes Sara Fischer, "and the media's response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid."
Tepid is a nice way of putting it. While the Washington Post "corrected" some of its discredited reporting on the 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 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.
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What difference, at this point, does it make? Well, for one thing, the full truth is opaque, and the historical record has yet to be corrected. It still says that "Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops," a story that spawned from the environment created by the Steele dossier, on the New York Times website. This piece, like so many others, is incorrect. The "intelligence officials" who spread that story were running what amounted to a shadow government using a partisan concoction, illegal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests and a pliant media to sink the foreign policy of the elected president. It's one of the least democratic things I can think of.
It's worth knowing how it happened -- yet the public gets no explanation.
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