Trump dossier should have been checked

The destructive influence of new media on journalism standards peaked with the publication of the Trump dossier.

The destructive influence of new media on journalism standards worldwide reached a high point with the publication on January 10 of the Trump dossier about the new President’s supposed exploits and crimes in Russia.

The initially anonymous document, now known to have been compiled by former Mi6 agent Christopher Steele, was paid for by former Republican rivals of Trump and later by the Democrats.

It had been circulating in Washington and at major newspapers for months.

The eventual publisher, BuzzFeed, used the oldest justification in an editor’s bag of tricks: “We publish and you decide.”

BuzzFeed received some support from progressive political journals such as Mother Jones, but even left-of-centre CNN, which was first to report the BuzzFeed story in the general media, steered away from the specific allegations of financial misdeeds and personal perversion in Trump’s Russian dealings.

Rather than an act of transparency, as BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith described it, publishing 35 pages of unverified “intelligence” was, as David Graham wrote in The Atlantic on January 11, unfair to Trump in forcing him to respond to allegations “that might or might not be entirely scurrilous’’ and a dereliction of the reporter’s duty not just to dump information, as WikiLeaks does, but to sift that information and publish what is found to be factually accurate.

The US’s most famous investigative reporter, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, described the dossier as a “garbage document” and said Trump’s response was being under-reported.

Now neither The Atlantic, which editorialised for Hillary Clinton at the US election (only the third time it had endorsed a candidate in its 159-year history) nor Woodward are raging conservatives, and even Fairfax’s US- based progressive chief foreign correspondent Paul McGeough had reservations about the dossier.

The ABC seemed to have no such qualms.

The best take-down of the BuzzFeed decision to publish was by lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who led the reporting of the Edward Snowdon intelligence leaks for Britain’s left-wing daily The Guardian, which received the Snowdon intelligence dump.

Greenwald, no friend of conservatives, now writes for his own journal, The Intercept.

Greenwald started his January 11 piece with a warning from two-term US president and former five-star general Dwight Eisen­hower’s farewell address in 1961: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence ... by the military-industrial complex.

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Greenwald’s piece goes on to highlight the role of the US intelligence services in the dissemination of the Trump dossier.

He slams the intelligence community “deep state”, which he says is only interested in protecting its own vested interests from a sceptical Trump.

Criticising the endorsement of Clinton by former CIA directors in The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of whom mentioned Syria and Russia, Greenwald makes a critical point: whatever one’s views of Trump’s Moscow ties, “It is the democratic framework — the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest ... that should determine how they are resolved ... (such) policy disputes were debated out in the open ... and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.”

Exactly. And especially no journalist.

Of course Trump’s critics are right when they complain about the new President’s roles in the “birther” movement and his wildly exaggerated criminal conspiracy allegations again Clinton over her emails. But that is only the more reason for journalists to apply the same rigour to all politicians.

As Greenwald concludes about what the dossier means for journalism: the whole issue plays into the “fake news” debate and raises the risk that “in the eyes of many people (this) will for ever discredit — render impotent — future journalistic exposes that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing”.

BBC website media editor Amol Rajan gave BuzzFeed’s Smith the benefit of the doubt, accepting his motivation was not purely commercial. I would think that a fair accusation since Buzzfeed makes money from advertising related to its website traffic.

Rajan made the same observation about the possible effects of the dossier’s publication on journalism that The Atlantic and Glenn Greenwald did: “Mr Smith is saying the digital revolution has redefined journalism, creating publishers who are prepared to put lots of information into the public domain without verifying it.”

Now I can almost hear sceptical readers saying they believe the media has always done this, but in truth the rise of fake news in the lead-up to the presidential election, the establishment of hyper-partisan services such as Breitbart News and now the publication of the Trump dossier take traditional media’s progressive and conservative biases to a whole new level. There have always been serious left-wing and conservative broadsheets and tabloids. There have always been racy tabloids and racy broadcast current affairs shows. Just as there has been much serious broadcast political programming. Most have stood for a set of political values.

But in the main, the news pages of the newspapers and the regular news broadcasts of television and radio networks have been impartial and factual. Comment and even strident biases and points of view have been reserved for the opinion, letters and editorial pages and for current affairs opinion and talkback programs clearly seeking audiences of a like mind.

The Trump dossier takes this to a whole new level.

Readers of this column will know I wrote the day before the election and a month earlier that Trump could win. But neither the conservatives who say he will be a great president nor the progressives who have been melting down since November have a clue what will happen over the next four years.

Journalists, especially those working for traditional media where credibility is everything in a challenged business environment, need to wait and see. They are destroying public trust in campaigning for or against the new president before he has made his first executive decision.