How I Knew the Steele Dossier Was Bunk from the Start

T he New York Times is at it again, taking stock of mainstream coverage and basically apologizing for its failures. Perhaps apologizing for existing in the liberal information bubble it is responsible for creating.

This time, the apology is about the coverage of the Trump-Russia conspiracy from the Steele dossier — the collection of rumors, bullspit, and tosh that was financed by the Hilary Clinton presidential campaign, and ginned up until the FBI was investigating it. The media’s own credulous coverage of the dossier was used by the intelligence agencies to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil the Trump campaign. And in the end, this fake news dominated cable outlets and breathless scoops for two years.

This attempt at forcing a reckoning takes the form of a guest essay by Bill Grueskin about the general failure of the media — particularly Times rivals such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Grueskin explained that the media reversed its own professional standards. In the case of Trump and Russia, it began treating extraordinary claims as true unless entirely disproved. Why? Well, because the world is not perfect. No, really. Grueskin writes:

The situation also became complicated because some reporters simply didn’t like or trust Mr. Trump or didn’t want to appear to be on his side. He had been berating journalists as charlatans while seeking their acclaim; calling on legislators to “open up our libel laws” to make it easier to sue news organizations; and launching personal attacks, especially on female reporters of color. In a perfect world, journalists would treat people they don’t like the same way they treat those they do like, but this is not a perfect world.

Now, the Times should not get off so easy here anyway. Some of its own reporting was just as shoddy. And even after the Steele dossier blew up, the Times continued to print non-credible stories originating from intelligence sources when those stories were damaging to Donald Trump. You may recall a thinly sourced story about the Trump administration ignoring Russian bounties awarded to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers.

And really, the problem is not confined to journalists and their work product. The corruption is deeper and more widespread. Worthless opinions and assessments from the “intelligence” community were used to justify the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden.

Some questions are never broached in these endless “reckonings.” Questions such as: “Who got it right from the beginning?” And: “Why?”

You didn’t need to wait nearly five years, until safely after Trump’s electoral loss, to find out why BuzzFeed printed the dossier, why it caused a feeding frenzy in the media, or why people should understand it was a load of garbage. You could have just read, well . . . me from the beginning. Here’s what I wrote two days after the dossier was published:

The media is sinking to Donald Trump’s level.

Reeling from their inability to stop his election, envious of his power to make people believe his most ridiculous statements, and rinsed by a needy mood for self-soothing, the media and other American institutions are greeting the era of Trump by lowering their ethical and professional standards and indulging in attention-seeking hysteria. However cathartic it may be, the effect is suicidal for the media and dangerous for the nation.

How did I know? Well, for one, when Ben Smith published the Steele dossier, he did so with a note explaining, ludicrously, that his team of ferocious reporters “have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them.” Being a journalist, I knew that wasn’t journalism. That’s not the standard. Worse was that some of the stories in the dossier had utterly fictitious elements. One story included a non-existent Russian consulate in Miami. That was easy to verify, and simply adding it as context would have given readers some level of reference for judging other claims in it.

Instead, we had the intel community laundering campaign sleaze into the media. And then as the media regurgitated the crap it was fed back, the intel community took those reports to court to get warrants.

Why was I primed to be skeptical? Because for years I’d been interested in news about Russia and Eastern Europe. I had developed a certain level of skepticism about Western reporting on anything happening east of the Elbe. Much reporting about the Maidan revolution had been useless. After 2014, the Left had made Russia into a proxy of its domestic culture-war antagonists. And so, it believed any perfidy about Russia. Stories sourced to intel-community-friendly sources detailing the Russia-Trump conspiracy were already blowing up in the faces of their authors.

We didn’t need a perfect world to avoid this disaster. You just needed the bare minimum of professional standards, and a traditional journalist’s nose for bulls***.