…Christopher Steele is a former MI6 agent who, through his company Orbis Business Intelligence, was engaged (initially allegedly by FusionGPS) to investigate Donald Trump to find information to “stop his nomination bid.”
Steele used his contacts in Russia to uncover potentially damaging information. He passed that information onto the FBI.
That information was published recently by Buzzfeed. That decision to publish has received wide-spread criticism from other members of the press.
I think that the people who are criticizing Buzzfeed are wrong. I not only think they were correct to publish: they had a duty to publish. Here are my reasons why.
-Steele is a credible source. Apart from his intelligence credentials, he has been vouched for (off the record) by multiple independent sources, has worked before with the FBI to provide evidence that bought indictments to FIFA officials.
-This wasn’t secret. These documents have been circulating for months. Everybody knew about them. Everybody except the general public had seen these documents. There wasn’t a good reason for these documents not to be made public.
-If instead of Steele, an investigative journalist had used the same sources to get the same information there is no question the media outlet would have published. Nearly every other media outlet have run stories with much less corroboration than this one. Almost every media organisation has run press-releases from companies/the government as is without independent verification. And if this document had been released by Steele himself on “his blog” then everyone would have run with the story.
-We are never going to get independent verification of Steele’s dossier. His sources are either now in hiding or dead. The videos, if they exist, are most definitely secure. Steele was a spy who relied on human assets to get his information. The media were going to wait until they got “independent verification.” But that was never ever going to happen.
-The media should not, IMHO, act as gatekeepers and defacto censors.
-This story opens the door to another, just as important story.
The release of this dossier puts a whole lot of the things that happened pre-election in context: something that simply wasn’t possible if the dossier was not released.
The Vice President of Poynter has an opposite view. Her opinion can be read here:
[QUOTE=Kelly McBride]
That argument is handy when Americans have the tools that they need in order to make up their own mind. But in this case, they don’t have such tools. Here we have information that is very difficult — perhaps impossible — to verify, and it’s unfair to ask the average citizen to just make up his mind. That’s impractical and counterproductive.
What we’ll have in this case is people simply believing whatever they want, whatever their gut tells them. The average citizen has absolutely no capacity to make up his own mind on this.
So what good does printing this do if it can’t be established as fact?
[/QUOTE]
I do not believe it is the media’s job to assess what tools Americans use to “make up their minds.” If the media were not to run any story until they could establish it as “fact” then [hyperbole]nothing that President Elect has said over the last year should have been published.[/hyperbole]
And most disturbing for me, Sean Illing said this:
[QUOTE= Sean Illing]
The report is counterproductive because it feeds directly into Trump’s narrative about a corrupt and unreliable media. By printing this without any corroboration, BuzzFeed has presented Trump with a rare gift: an accurate talking point.
[/QUOTE]
The media should not be making decisions on what stories to run based on how the President of the United States will “construct a narrative”. But I fear that this is exactly what many in the media are doing. The “free press” have lost sight of their “responsibilities” and are more worried about “access” and how they are “perceived by the public” than they are with doing what many would regard “as their job.” With (IMHO) a clearly unstable person at the helm of the most powerful country in the world: there is no more important time in history for the press to get off their arses and to remember why they became journalists in the first place.
A lot of people (none of them American) went to a great deal of personal risk and sacrifice to bring this dossier to the people responsible for keeping America safe. And when the people responsible for keeping America safe don’t do their jobs: the American people have a right to know.
The press had a responsibility to publish. Buzzfeed were right to publish. The rest of the media should be standing behind Buzzfeed: not throwing them under a bus.