http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/01/sometimes_the_media_should_be.html#incart_river_i ndex NOLA.COM LOUISIANA POLITICS & GOVERNMENT Sometimes the media should be scolded Posted on January 12, 2017 at 11:45 AM 292 In this Jan. 11, 2017, photo, President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York. The incoming president staged a defiant and frenetic news conference at his gilded New York City tower, dismissing critics, insulting reporters and likening the country's intelligence officers to Nazis. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Tim Morris, NOLA.com tmorris@nola.com 0shares http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/01/sometimes_the_media_should_be.html#incart_river_i ndex President-elect Donald Trump bashing the news media is nothing new. But this time, a lot of the media agree with him, on the underlying facts at least, if not his tone and specific language. In his press conference Wednesday (Jan. 11), Trump called the news outlets that had published stories about a 35-page dossier of unverified salacious information about him to be purveyors of "fake news," "disgusting" and "a failing pile of garbage." Most of his ire was aimed at CNN, which broke a story Tuesday about the existence of the information, and the website Buzzfeed, which shortly after the CNN story dumped the entire document on the internet. Everyone, including CNN and Buzzfeed, agrees that the information is unconfirmed, some of it unconfirmable and some of it outright wrong. The dossier, it turns out, was put together by a former British intelligence officer with the very 007-like name of Christopher Steele. It was opposition research compiled for Trump's opponents in the Republican primaries and later offered to Democrats. The idea was that the Russians were using the information to influence Trump. That has not been verified and the Russians deny it. Freewheeling Trump press conference hits several topics He also had his tax attorney lay out the details of how he would isolate his businesses from the presidency. So how does one justify publishing it? BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith wrote a memo to his staff explaining the decision and then posted it on Twitter. "Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers," Smith said. "We have always erred on the side of publishing. In this case, the document was in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media. It seems to lie behind a set of vague allegations from the Senate Majority Leader to the director of the FBI and a report that intelligence agencies have delivered to the president and president-elect. "As we noted in our story there is serious reason to doubt the allegations. We have been chasing specific claims in the documents for weeks, and will continue to." This journalistic model, if you can call it that, is "We have information that we can't authenticate and have serious reason to doubt, but we'll just dump in the public and let you figure it out." This is a factory for producing fake news, and pretty soon you have a guy with a gun showing up at a pizza parlor to rescue abused children. While the reference to the document being "in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media" could be meant to bestow some credibility on the information it actually does the opposite. Government and news organizations could http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/01/sometimes_the_media_should_be.html#incart_river_i ndex not verify the information and therefore responsibly chose not to make it public. Some had been trying to verify the claims for months. Kremlin denies it gathered compromising info on Trump "Such information isn't consistent with reality and is nothing but an absolute fantasy." CNN shoved Buzzfeed under the bus with its explanatory statement: "CNN's decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than Buzzfeed's decision to publish unsubstantiated memos," the statement says. "The Trump team knows this. They are using Buzzfeed's decision to deflect from CNN's reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations. We are fully confident in our reporting. It represents the core of what the First Amendment protects, informing the people of the inner workings of their government; in this case, briefing materials prepared for President Obama and President-elect Trump last week. "We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report's allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate." On the one hand, CNN's approach seems more reasonable. But it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Its story referred to more general allegations without enough detail for readers to evaluate. It leaves the vague impression that these are serious allegations, while a reading of the document dump makes it clear that this is little more than a hodgepodge of rumors and smears. http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/01/sometimes_the_media_should_be.html#incart_river_i ndex The temptation is stronger than ever in the internet age to "go for the clicks," so we should be grateful for all the news organizations that refused to take the publicationwithout-verification shortcut. But we should all worry about what this does to the news industry's credibility at a time it already is on life support. Here are some links to coverage of the media controversy: The Trouble With Publishing the Trump Dossier | The Atlantic How BuzzFeed crossed the line in publishing salacious 'dossier' on Trump | The Washington Post BuzzFeed Posts Unverified Claims on Trump, Igniting a Debate | The New York Times About that Explosive Trump Story: Take a Deep Breath | Lawfare Why BuzzFeed Was Wrong to Publish the Trump Dossier | NiemanReports BuzzFeed drops a Trump bombshell, irresponsibly | Poynter Tim Morris is an opinions columnist at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. He can be reached at tmorris@nola.com. Follow him on Twitter @tmorris504.
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