There is, however, a big difference between Woodward and Bernstein in the Nixon administration vs Jason Leopold and Buzzfeed today. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t have a long history of publishing what they knew to be blatant lies. Leopold does.
Here’s an article from from the widely respected Columbia Journalism Review documenting Leopold’s history of lying and then blaming everyone except himself when he gets caught. It’s his standard modus operandi to just go to print declaring that he’s done a ton of research and has a pile of verifiable evidence and reliable witnesses, when in reality he’s got nothing. He lies about seeing evidence. He fabricates quotes. He says that he interviewed people when in reality he never even met them.
Combine that with Buzzfeed’s total lack of standards and there’s just not much here.
I agree with you about the quality of the CJR and Leopold’s spotty history, but aside from the fact that another reporter, Anthony Cormier, was also involved in the story, I have to ask, what is your point? Is it your contention that there’s no way Trump would ever have directed Cohen to lie to Congress? Trump, who has virtually made a career out of lying, who is such a habitual liar and so corrupt, self-serving, and morally bankrupt that he pretty much regards “truth” as any story that benefits his self-interest regardless of its relation to the facts, and who has repeatedly, incontrovertibly directed others to lie and cover up his misdeeds?
Mueller’s office has indicated that there are factual inaccuracies in the story, but we don’t know what they are, or how significant they are. My belief is that he’d prefer that any calls for serious actions like impeachment be based on the solid facts established by his investigation and not on anything that could be undermined by challenges to even the most superficial aspects of the allegations.
I’ll put it this way. If Jason Leopold says it’s a duck, and I observe that it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then I’m going to be inclined to believe that it is a duck, notwithstanding Leopold’s regrettable track record in misidentifying waterfowl.
This is, as Jeffrey Toobin pointed out, a bad day for journalism, but it really tells us nothing about what the facts are. And it’s a good day for the Trumpists, because it implicitly casts doubt on all other allegations, even well established ones. In fact, if the Trumpists in the White House weren’t such a laughable cadre of incompetents, I might almost suspect that they planted the Buzzfeed story.
Dan Rather reported, although in good faith, falsified evidence about something that actually did happen (Dubya Bush’s blowing off his National Guard service). That falseness got used in a partisan political manner to discredit all the real evidence and its factuality.
Yes. I’m specifically interested in the provenance of the apparently forged documents. Were they created by Karl Rove or one of his disciples to deflect attention from the truth? If so would that be a different verb: “Dan Rather had gotten Roved and with the ‘Killian documents’ discredited was forced to resign.”
My meaning of the term is that he was fed, not merely falsified info, but falsified info with a “fatal flaw” built into it which, once exposed, would be used to discredit Rather specifically and the “liberal media” generally. (The “fatal flaw” in this instance was the use of “superscripts” which would not have been used on the typewriters on which the documents were supposedly typed.)
Or perhaps Sloaned. Hugh Sloan worked for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Woodward and Bernstein used him as an unnamed source in a story but got one relatively minor fact wrong, that Sloan had given the the grand jury the same information he gave them. The White House used that error to denounce the entire story. The essence of the story was later proven and WoodStein’s reputation restored, to say the least.
But that is Rather’s fault. If you reach a level in journalism as he did, you don’t go off frothing at the mouth upon seeking these documents simply because he wanted so badly to hurt George W. Bush. He did not do basic fact checking.
Had he shown me those documents, within five minutes I would have observed that early 1970s typewriters could not make those superscripts. The episode exposed Rather as a journalist who had a clear bias, one so bad that he allowed such shoddy evidence to come out on a national network. I don’t feel sorry for him a bit.
I suspect you’re rather severely exaggerating your expertise, given that a number of experts believed that such typewriters did exist. For example, from Wikipedia:
John Collins, vice president and chief technology officer at Bitstream Inc., the parent of MyFonts.com, stated that word processors that could produce proportional-sized fonts cost upwards of $20,000 at the time (equivalent to $120,000 in 2018)
Which is a statement that it could be done, but would require expensive equipment. Also:
Bill Glennon, a technology consultant in New York City with typewriter repair experience from 1973 to 1985, said experts making the claim that typewriters were incapable of producing the memos “are full of crap. They just don’t know.” He said there were IBM machines capable of producing the spacing, and a customized key — the likes of which he said were not unusual — for creating the superscript th.
Now, maybe these experts are wrong. But they are actual experts, and they’re not nearly as sure as you claim to be that it couldn’t be done.
When someone who is not an expert makes definitive claims about something which actual experts are unsure of, I suspect that person probably isn’t worth listening to.
Trump has has raised the white flag on building his wall.
This is genuinely the beginning of the end for him, because once his supporters start to see him as a ‘loser’, he is finished.
The kind of people who support Trump don’t like ‘losers’.
He wanted $5.7 billion and got exactly $0. And with his shutdown, he managed to piss off large numbers of people in the process. He has failed, surrendered, come out with hands up. Nancy Pelosi has won.
He can’t hide from this, or talk his way out of it. His next attempt to build his wall (if there ever is one) will be more difficult, not less. It’s not going to happen. From now on, his only way is down.
his next attempt will likely be in 3 weeks. I’m hopeful it is not successful nor that he holds the government hostage again, but honestly I see him attempting to play the National Emergency card.
Because I like a good dose of Schadenfreude when I can get it, I lurked on over to the free republic to see how they were handling things.
Loosely I would say that they broke down roughly evenly into 3 categories
feeling upset/betrayed with the RINO refusing to defend the border ala Ann Coulter
Disappointed but being sure to state that they were still standing by Trump
Convinced that this wasn’t really a set back and the the Democrats fell into Trumps cleverly laid trap. The master Negotiator clearly has something up his sleeve that will wipe the smile off the Dems face. Just you wait!