Washington Post Memory-Holes and Alters Its Rotten Steele Dossier Stories

2845. This was the number of words it took to create this article Washington PostGlenn Kessler was a fact-checker who was used to help explain why Thursday’s event occurred. Washington Post, along with much of the rest of the media, for years treated the now-discredited Steele dossier as some kind of investigative “bombshell” endangering Trump.

In an “explainer” piece headlined “The Steele dossier: A guide to the latest allegations,” Kessler admitted “There is an old saying in journalism: You’re only as good as your sources. A Nov. 3 indictment is now against Kessler. [Igor] Danchenko on five counts of lying to the FBI has suggested that Steele’s sources were not very good at all.”

Kessler is embarrassed by this. Post,Steele’s stenchy dossier was a source of great concern to many. This new piece is in stark contrast to the April 24, 2019 Glenn Kessler who piously proclaimed that This dossier serves as a Rorschach political test. Depending on your perspective, it’s either a hoax used to defame a future president or a credible guide to allegations about Trump’s involvement with Russia.”

Sorry, Glenn. The hoax was used to create a thousand stories of collusion in newscasts, newspapers, and magazines. The toothpaste tubes are filled with thousands of them and can not be put back inside the tube. He explained: 

Cable news programs praised the dossier and Democrats referred to it in congressional hearings. The fact that the dossier’s funding was traced to the Clinton campaign — and that Steele had actively pitched the findings to news reporters — gave Trump and his defenders an opening to try to discredit the Russia-related investigations as partisan-inspired witch hunts.

The dossier had already been darkening Trump’s reign, even before Trump was inaugurated. Nine months later, the Clinton campaign’s financing wasn’t disclosed. This is not an “opening”, but it’s a fact that the Steele dossier was “partisan-inspired witch hunting.”

Kessler also added,The Danchenko indictment has further bolstered the perception, especially on the right, that the dossier was a smear campaign orchestrated by Trump’s opponents.” Perception? 

We love the Washington PostKessler and Kessler both wanted to believe the Steele dossier was true. They are currently engaged in major backtracking, deleting some stories and altering fourteen others. This did not go down well with Politico’s Jack Shafer, who urged on Wednesday for the preservation of the original stories, in “Let’s Not Consign Journalistic Transparency to the Memory Hole.”

What’s peculiar about the Post’s method of error correction was its decision to vaporize the two original stories. The original stories can’t be retrieved from LexisNexis, as the PostEnde 2020, the database was removed. Post spokesperson Kristine Coratti Kelly tells me the deleted pages can be found on Factiva, a Dow Jones subscription database, but Factiva costs about $249 a month, which makes it expensive for readers who can’t afford the service to determine precisely what the paper’s first rough draft got wrong and how it was amended.

Farhi was told by W. Joseph Campbell, American University media historian. Such extensive rewriting of decades-old text is rare. Stephen Bates is a University of Nevada at Las Vegas professor of journalism. “It’s hard to have a paper of record if the record keeps changing,” Bates says.

Our main beef isn’t that the PostFailing to tell a story. Numerous outlets misreport stories. As Bill Grueskin has just explained, many people gave too much credence the Steele dossier story.How the paper handles its errors in light of new information is the issue. In order to make both the error as well as the revision transparent, outlets usually note mistakes in their corrections columns. Often, such corrections require moderate bits of rewriting, but rarely to the extent of the Post’s two dossier stories.

…Readers shouldn’t have to purchase pricey news databases to determine what newspapers originally published.

…Back in pre-web days, the best way to keep tabs on a newspaper’s honesty quotient (short of stealing somebody’s LexisNexis account) was to clip stories or check microfilm. Then came the web, and it became an easy matter to dial up a newspaper’s back pages. But no more. At some publications, the written record can be expunged if it contains embarrassing information. This is the final phase. PostIs tossing out old and flawed stories down the memory hole. Is this how journalism dies … in darkness?