Beautiful, creates a head bowing moment.
Are NBC and CNN Paying Off Top Spies Who Leaked Info With On-Air Jobs?
The compromising informationâranging from allegations of the Trump teamâs criminal activities to the sexual depravities of Trump himselfâwas sourced to a 35-page-long opposition research file allegedly authored by the ex-British spy Christopher Steele. The so-called Steele dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which hired the Washington, D.C. opposition research firm Fusion GPS to produce and disseminate it to the press. As the award citation explains: âThanks to this CNN investigation, âthe dossierâ is now part of the lexicon.â
CNN has never disclosed the close relationship between Evan Perez, one of the reporters on the Jan. 10, 2017 story, and his former Wall Street Journal colleagues who went on to start Fusion GPS, including the companyâs founder Glenn Simpson. Nor did the Merriman Smith prize committee acknowledge how the dossier on which the leading lights of the news business have again staked their institutional credibility was disseminated to the public.
That story is now coming into focus with the recent release of seven government documents that together detail a working partnership between spy agencies and the press that helped a political attack meme go viral, even though the evidence on which it was based was demonstrably false. While this type of relationshipâletâs call it collusionâmay be routine in Third World countries, it does not bode well for the health of the American press, or our democratic institutions.
Lies, innuendo, wild conspiracy theorizing, and the insistent assumption of guilt have replaced old-fashioned rules of sourcing, objectivity, and basic plausibility.
http:// www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/261158/trump-russia-collusion
Indeed, when the public is held to a higher standard than they are it is quite a problem. Hopefully,trust and true law and order will be restored, with or without them.