Four years without an ombudsman, the New York Times does not address the matter directly, but has spent the week surrounding the journalistic debacle of the Steele dossier, a report paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump.
Its 35 pages came out in full, in 2017, on the BuzzFeed website, then edited by Ben Smith, now a media columnist for the NYT. It listed alleged facts that would make Trump a hostage of the Russian government.
On Tuesday (16), the NYT published an article by an academic, saying in the headline that “The Steele Dossier Indicted the Media.”
In short, “he was discredited by the indictment of a leading source, leaving journalists to appreciate how so many were taken so easily.” Avoiding citing Smith, the text focused however on the role of BuzzFeed.
The indictment took place this month, and the Washington Post subsequently took excerpts of reports and a video off the air.
On Thursday (18), the NYT interviewed WPost editor Sally Buzbee, who defended the newspaper’s performance at the time, saying that “it never published the dossier or anything like that”. To which the NYT commented, “Got it. You’re not BuzzFeed.”
Perhaps Ben Smith will eventually recant his 2017 decision, but he shows no signs of doing so. He told the Columbia Journalism Review that “it smacks of hypocrisy that the major media are dancing on the dossier shell” when they “used the fact that BuzzFeed publishes it to feed their endless ‘loop’ of dossier comments “.
Among others, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and MSNBC also embarked at the time.
One of the most active journalists in the slow deconstruction of coverage of the Steele dossier, Matt Taibbi, now on Substack, wrote that everything indicates that “Smith will be thrown overboard”, like Judith Miller.
She is the NYT reporter who two decades ago reported evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, paving the way for the invasion. Others, who acted like her, “went out either unharmed or promoted.”
Pressure for greater “settlement of scores” continues, including on WPost, which won Pulitzer for coverage. The tone is violent, in vehicles that have not boarded. Axios calls it “one of the most notable mistakes in modern journalistic history” in the country and calls it “The great failure of the media”.
O DESABAFO DE HU XIJIN
The famous Global Times/Huanqiu editor, Hu Xijin, vented on Weibo, on the journalist’s day in China:
“Frankly speaking, media professionals are being subjected to increasing restrictions, and most of these come from government departments and local governments, which demand close cooperation, demanding what the media should and should not report. enthusiasm will have the journalists.”
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