Briefly, this is what happened: On Friday, CNN reported that an e-mail had been uncovered offering the Trump campaign access to the Wikileaks hack of the Democratic National Committee’s correspondence. The e-mail, said CNN, was dated September 4.
News of the hack and the damaging information about the Democrats it disclosed was made public on September 14.
This e-mail would be proof that the Trump campaign, indeed Donald Trump himself, knew about the hack and was offered exclusive access to it beforehand.
U.S. intelligence considers Wikileaks to be connected to Russia. Therefore, this e-mail looked like the “smoking gun” proving Russia’s interference in the U.S. election and the Trump campaign’s collusion with that effort.
That’s how CNN reported it. Soon MSNBC and CBS picked up the story. Then Democrats far and wide started tweeting the “bombshell,” complete with atomic bomb pictures, declaring that President Trump is finished.
But later that day, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post , which is equally liberal but arguably has higher journalistic standards, reported that the actual date on the memo was not September 4 but September 14!
Wikileaks had already released the damaging material by the time this e-mail was sent to the Trump campaign! The sender was alerting the campaign to material that was already available!
Gradually, CNN and the other media outlets that reported the story, put out corrections.
But no explanations were forthcoming. CNN claimed that their information came from “sources”–they hadn’t even seen the e-mail!–but did not say how the mistake happened. Was the mistake reading the date a case of carelessness from their reporter, or did the source accidentally–or intentionally–get it wrong?
Greenwald says that reporters are ethics-bound to not reveal their sources, when they have agreed not to. But when a source intentionally feeds them incorrect information, then professional standards mandate that the sources be exposed.
But that hasn’t happened in this case. The question arises, who are they protecting?
This is not the only journalistic howler of recent days. Just last week ABC reported that Michael Flynn was going to testify that Donald Trump, while still a candidate, directed him to speak to the Russians. Again, the date was all mixed up. Actually, Flynn’s instructions came after Trump had been elected, when it’s customary for transition teams to consult with foreign governments.
Also, Reuters and Bloomberg came out with the story that special prosecutor Robert Mueller had subpoenaed a German bank for financial records pertaining to President Trump and his family, implying that the president has far-flung secret foreign bank accounts that hide dealings that might get him in trouble. But it turned out that the subpoenas did not involve the Trumps at all.
Again, you’ve got to read Greenwald’s discussion of these continuing media fiascos.
Illustration by Dsndrn-Videolar via Pixabay, CC0, Creative Commons
In their zeal to bring down President Trump, journalists have been making mistake after mistake. On Friday, television news reporters made what investigative journalism site The Intercept called the news media’s “Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages.”
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