Did you remember when Christopher Steele’s dossier that allegedly incriminated President Donald Trump was considered almost infallible holy text by many mainstream media outlets, including CNN? The FBI has indicted Christopher Steele as the principal source of this dossier. Now, what are the corrections made by the same media outlets to correct the record? This is the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple is now holding CNN to account and wonders when very specific members of that organization’s staff will publicly retract their assertions about how the Steele dossier was corroborated as you can see in his Friday column, “Does CNN still stand by its reporting on the Steele dossier?”
CNN reported on the indictment against Igor Danchenko last week. He was the main source of the 2016 discredited Trump Russia dossier, which Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, had compiled. The document, which stems from special counsel John Durham’s probe into the Russia investigation, alleged that Danchenko lied to the FBI about interactions with sources as he gathered material for Steele.
Wemple observed however that one crucial thing was missing from the discussion about this indictment.
There was one thing missing from that discussion: CNN’s long-standing claim that the Steele dossier had been at least partly corroborated. The Erik Wemple Blog documented many such comments by CNN reporters and hosts last year. A typical one came from host Don Lemon in November 2017: “Listen, so we haven’t reported here on CNN the salacious details of that dossier, but much of the dossier has been corroborated.”
Lemon wasn’t freelancing; his assessment originated from a February 2017 report by Perez and chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto, indicating that U.S. investigators had “corroborated some of the communications” in the dossier. The “intercepts do confirm that some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier, according to the officials,” noted the story. But even that report couldn’t confirm “whether any content relates to then-candidate Trump” and noted that “officials did not comment on or confirm any alleged conversations or meetings between Russian officials and US citizens, including associates of then-candidate Trump.”
Narrow though the reporting was, it served as a springboard for broader expressions of confidence in Steele’s work. “CNN, by the way, has corroborated some elements of that dossier,” said anchor Wolf Blitzer in June 2017. “A lot has been been verified,” said CNN anchor John Vause in January 2018.This dossier, if nothing else shows how unruly cable chatter could amplify a tight-worded print story.
Wemple asked CNN for comment but apparently, rather than correct the record, it seems they will continue to stand by its historical record of fake news on this topic.
In light of the recent developments, we asked CNN if it still stands by its “corroboration” reporting and, if so, to which specific parts of the dossier does that apply? No response was received. So, we’ll have to repeat the statement that the network provided for our 2020 story: “CNN stands by our reporting. The dossier’s approach has been uniform since the beginning. CNN only reported details when they were corroborated, part of a government filing, or publicly discussed by officials or those mentioned.”
Consistent? Consistent? CNN.com had another piece. By contrast, the “corroboration” story of February 2017 received saturation coverage at a network programmed to hype all Trump-related items. This brand of asymmetry explains why so many people distrust CNN.
Is CNN mistrusted as MSNBC by people or are they just speculating?
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