11/17/2021 / By JD Heyes
It’s been a long time coming and frankly, those of us in the independent media have known this for a long time — years, in fact — but some in the ‘mainstream media’ are finally admitting that their claims about the “Trump-Russia collusion” story as well as the bogus “Steele dossier” were not just a little ‘off,’ but completely wrong.
As in, ‘major fake news’ wrong.
“A reckoning is hitting news organizations for years-old coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document’s primary source was charged with lying to the FBI,” noted Axios’ Sara Fischer last week after special counsel John Durham indicted Igor Danchenko, a Russian national and sub-source for dossier author Christopher Steele.
“It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid,” she continued, adding that a “reckoning” has occurred at several media outlets who — let’s be honest — were willing to publish the garbage claims against the candidate and then President Donald Trump because he was a Republican and they didn’t like him.
Fox News (which frequently got the reporting on this scam correct) added:
The Washington Post corrected and removed large chunks of its own reporting on the anti-Trump Steele dossier on Friday, admitting it “could no longer stand by the accuracy” of those elements. But other liberal news organizations including ABC News, MSNBC and CNN haven’t followed the Post’s lead and erroneous reporting remains uncorrected.
The mainstream media used the always-unverified, now-discredited Steele dossier to paint former President Donald Trump as compromised by Russia.
“Outsized coverage of the unvetted document drove a media frenzy at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency that helped drive a narrative of collusion between former President Trump and Russia,” Fischer wrote.
Last week, the Washington Post became the first major print and digital outlet to change its false reporting on the issue.
“The paper altered two major stories, adding editor’s notes, and deleting sections of its reporting that identified Belarusian-American businessman Sergei Millian as a key source of the dossier,” Fox News noted.
“The paper had inaccurately reported that Millian was ‘Source D,’ an unnamed figure who passed scandalous tidbits to Steele. The Post’s bombshell correction came as other news outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, have been criticized for failing to adjust dossier-related reporting as its credibility crumbled,” the report added.
Post reporter Paul Farhi noted in a piece that the indictment suggests “Danchenko may have gotten his information about the hotel encounter not from Millian but from a Democratic Party operative with long-standing ties to Hillary Clinton,” adding that it’s possible Clinton ally Charles Dolan, Jr. could be the unnamed operative.
“The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story,” Farhi wrote.
But so many others in the “mainstream media” have not bothered to issue corrections to their own lying stories or, in the case of CNN’s left-wing lunatic ‘media analyst’ Brian Stelter, have not even acknowledged that the reporting is wrong in the first place, which is just as bad and frankly, makes them doubly culpable after the fact.
Republicans were on to this hoax early as well. Then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes of California took the lead in congressional investigations that not only cleared Trump but also implicated Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe and several officials at the Justice Department.
And regardless of the number of Trump campaign officials who were eventually indicted, the fact is Trump was never charged because the entire ‘collusion’ narrative was false in the first place — a deep state lie meant to bring down his presidency that Hillary took part in.
This entire ordeal is a disgrace, a huge stain on our country and a massive black mark against our ‘free and fair’ media, which is now an organ of propaganda.
Sources include:
Tagged Under: 2016 election, Christopher Steele, CNN, deception, Donald Trump, fake news, Hillary Clinton, hoax, Journalism, lies, mainstream media, NYT, President Trump, propaganda, Russia, Russia collusion, Russian collusion, Steele Dossier, WashPost
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