JOURNALISTS SHOULD EXPOSE FALSE SOURCES
Unfortunately, many outlets are catering to their self-interest instead of the truth
JUST last week, the Washington Post decided — to great applause (including mine) — to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-therecord protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post.
It’s a well-established principle of journalism that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information.
Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith?
Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened, it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple sources all fed the wrong data to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.
If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and highly-inflammatory story to be reported, then these media outlets have an obligation to expose who the culprits are — just as the Washington Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a nobody-in-DC, rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee).
How can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News”, when this is the conduct behind which they hide when getting caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?
The more serious you think the Trump/Russia story is, the more dangerous you think it is when Trump attacks the US media as “Fake News”, the more you should be disturbed by what happened here.
And the more transparency and accountability you should be demanding.
If you’re someone who thinks Trump’s attacks on the media are dangerous, then you should be first in line objecting when they act recklessly and demand transparency and accountability from them.
Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend (one could say a constant) when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia and WikiLeaks.
I have spent a good part of the last year documenting the extraordinarily numerous, consequential and reckless stories that have been published, and then corrected, rescinded and retracted, by major media outlets when it comes to this story.
All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes.
The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. That is all to be expected.
But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction, and other times go in the other direction.
That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction — to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump/Russia story and about Russia, particularly.
At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, towards advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.
No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the US media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.
Just consider the ones from the last week alone, as enumerated by the New York Times recently in its news report on CNN’s embarrassment.
Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Trump had instructed Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.
The report fuelled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Trump’s instruction to Flynn came after he was president-elect.
Several news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, also inaccurately reported this week that Deutsche Bank had received a subpoena from the special counsel, Robert Mueller, for Trump’s financial records.
The president and his circle have not been shy about pointing out the errors.
That’s just the last week alone. Let’s just remind ourselves of how many times major media outlets have made humiliating, breathtaking errors on the Trump/Russia story, always in the same direction, towards the same political goals.
Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims:
RUSSIA hacked into the US electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Washington Post);
AN anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major US political sites are Kremlin agents (Washington Post);
WIKILEAKS has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian);
A SECRET server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate);
RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune);
CROWDSTRIKE finds Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike);
RUSSIANS attempted to hack election systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security); and,
LINKS have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN).
That really is just a small sample. So continually awful and misleading has this reporting been that even Vladimir Putin’s most devoted critics, such as Russian expatriate Masha Gessen, oppositional Russian journalists, and anti-Kremlin liberal activists in Moscow, are constantly warning that the US media’s unhinged, ignorant, paranoid reporting on Russia is harming their cause in all sorts of ways — in the process, destroying the credibility of the US media in the eyes of Putin’s opposition.
US media outlets are very good at demanding respect. They love to imply, if not outright state, that being patriotic and a good American means that one must reject efforts to discredit them and their reporting because that’s how one defends press freedom.
But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand respect and credibility, but to earn it.
That means that there shouldn’t be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false stories are published to plaudits, traffic and other rewards, only to fall apart upon minimal scrutiny.
It certainly means that all of
...when the US media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.
these “errors” shouldn’t be pointing in the same direction, pushing the same political outcome or journalistic conclusion.
But what it means most of all is that when media outlets are responsible for such grave and consequential errors as the spectacle we witnessed on Friday, they have to take responsibility for it by offering transparency and accountability. That can’t mean hiding behind PR and lawyer silence and waiting for this to blow away.
At minimum, these networks — CNN, MSNBC and CBS — have to either identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information, or explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same information wrong in innocence and good faith.
Until they do that, their cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should fall on deaf ears.
(Update: hours after this article was published — a full dayand-a-half after his original tweets promoting the false CNN story with a “boom” and cannon — Benjamin Wittes finally got around to noting that the CNN story has “serious problems”. Needless to say, that acknowledgment received a fraction only of retweets from his followers compared with his tweets hyping the story).
The writer is one of three co-founding editors of The Intercept. He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer and author of four ‘New York Times’ best-selling books on politics and law