The response by U.S. media to their earlier reporting on the so-called Steele dossier underscores the need for transparency to maintain credibility and the audience’s trust, analysts say.
First published by the news website Buzzfeed, details from the dossier contained explosive allegations of conspiracy between then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia, and it became a focus of heavy news coverage in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election.
But several of its damning claims were later found to be unsubstantiated and a federal indictment unsealed in early November against the analyst, Igor Danchenko, who allegedly collected some parts of the dossier, for lying to the FBI.
Now, several U.S. news outlets have updated or corrected past reporting on the story.
The , for example, removed and corrected sections from two articles published in 2017 and 2019, and removed a video that summarized an earlier article. A note on the 2017 article said that details have since been contradicted, including that Belarusian American businessman Sergei Millian was a source for the dossier.
Executive Editor Sally Buzbee was cited in a about the changes as saying the paper “could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story.” Previously Millian had denied that he had helped Steele with the dossier.
CNN, in an article headlined: “The Steele Dossier: A Reckoning” said that subsequent lawsuits and investigations had “discredited many of [the dossier’s] central allegations,” and raised questions over the “political underpinnings of some key explosive claims.”
BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has stood by its original decision to publish the dossier. , along with a note at the top informing readers that, ‘the allegations are unverified, and the report contain errors.”
For Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, the discredited dossier is an example of the complexity journalists deal with when deciding whether to publish.
In mid-November, Grueskin published an essay in the opinion section of , headlined: “”
One of the answers, the essay suggests, is Donald Trump's personality.
" fact-checkers would eventually catalog more than during his term in the White House,” Grueskin wrote. “When a well-known liar tells you that something is false, the instinct is to believe that it might well be true."
In an interview with VOA, Grueskin said that although there was evidence of Russian misconduct in 2016, “There are also many incidents when Trump's conduct toward Vladimir Putin showed tremendous obeisance.”
Because of that, Grueskin told VOA, "There was a tendency to believe the worst.”
The dossier’s most grandiose allegations have not held up over time. News reports now often refer to it as being “largely debunked.” But there are some well-known aspects that it did get right, including that Russia’s Vladimir Putin actively favored then-candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and there were multiple contacts between Russians and people in the Trump campaign.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The FBI found evidence of a hacking and propaganda campaign, and at least three Russian companies and 25 individuals were later indicted, the .
Grueskin didn’t speculate on whether BuzzFeed should have published the dossier. But, from a broader perspective, Grueskin said, “If you can't verify something, you don't publish it.”
As a journalism professor, Grueskin said the advice he gives to students includes “being transparent with the audience about what a reporter knows or doesn’t know.”
“I think it's fine for a reporter to have a prominent paragraph on the top of the story that says, ‘This is what we don't know yet. These are things that we cannot confirm,’” he said.
For Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the important takeaway from the media’s reckoning over the dossier is the significance of correcting mistakes.
“Good quality news organizations are always prepared to correct their mistakes,” Kirtley told VOA. “Journalists publish millions of facts a year and the odds are that they're going to get some of them wrong. The issue is not whether you make a mistake, but whether you correct it.”
The lessons of good reporting are well known, Kirtley added.