Trump Russian ties fake news report reported by BuzzFeed and CNN exposed by NY Times, “unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources”, “dossier prepared by a former British intelligence officer hired by Mr. Trump’s political opponents”
“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?”…Donald Trump
“Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false—we can say that the Russian government is not the source,”…Julian Assange
“We are being lied to on a scale unimaginable by George Orwell.”…Citizen Wells
From the NY Times January 10, 2017.
“BuzzFeed Posts Unverified Claims on Trump, Stirring Debate
BuzzFeed News became the center of a swirling debate over journalistic ethics on Tuesday after its decision to publish a 35-page document carrying explosive, but unverified, allegations about ties between the Russian government and President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The document, a dossier prepared by a former British intelligence officer hired by Mr. Trump’s political opponents, had been circulating among high-ranking politicians and some journalists since the fall. Intelligence officials recently presented a two-page summary of the allegations to Mr. Trump and President Obama, CNN reported on Tuesday.
But CNN declined to include the specific allegations contained in the dossier — such as collusion between Mr. Trump’s team and Russian operatives — saying that its journalists could not independently verify them.
Roughly an hour later, BuzzFeed, in a break from typical journalistic practice, posted the document that fully detailed the unverified allegations to which CNN had alluded.
“BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government,” BuzzFeed wrote.
Ben Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, declined to comment beyond the article, which carried the bylines of three BuzzFeed reporters. But in a memo to his staff, Mr. Smith offered a further explanation about why the site had published the document.
“Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” Mr. Smith wrote. “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.
“Publishing this document was not an easy or simple call, and people of good will may disagree with our choice,” Mr. Smith added. “But publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”
The reports by CNN and Buzzfeed sent other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, scrambling to publish their own articles, some of which included generalized descriptions of the unverified allegations about Mr. Trump. By late Tuesday, though, only BuzzFeed had published the full document.
BuzzFeed’s decision, besides its immediate political ramifications for a president-elect who is to be inaugurated in 10 days, was sure to accelerate a roiling debate about the role and credibility of the traditional media in today’s frenetic, polarized information age.
Of particular interest was the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources, a practice that fueled some of the so-called fake news — false rumors passed off as legitimate journalism — that proliferated during the presidential election.”
“In a brief interview in the Times newsroom on Tuesday evening, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said the paper would not publish the document because the allegations were “totally unsubstantiated.”
“We, like others, investigated the allegations and haven’t corroborated them, and we felt we’re not in the business of publishing things we can’t stand by,” Mr. Baquet said.”
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