CNN’s fake ‘reckoning’ over the Steele dossier

CNN’s fake ‘reckoning’ over the Steele dossier

By Erik Wemple

Media critic

November 23, 2021 at 1:29 p.m. EST

A federal indictment unsealed on Nov. 4 against Igor Danchenko, the main collector for the Steele dossier on alleged Trump-Russia coordination, brought that already-discredited document back into the public conversation. Key claims in the indictment, furthermore, snowballed into a big media story, raising specific concerns about reports in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and ABC News — as well as more general concerns about how outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, McClatchy and Mother Jones handled the story.

Yet “Reliable Sources,” Brian Stelter’s Sunday media program on CNN, hasn’t found air time for the Steele dossier. There have been no mentions of the document over the past three editions of the program, though there has been chatter about how Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch may approach the 2024 election and Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast.

We asked Stelter to explain the dossier’s omission. “No on the record comment,” replied the stickler for public transparency via DM.

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There’ll be no speculation here on why Stelter glossed over this story, though we should note: It would have made for some interesting television, given CNN’s own role in hyping the alleged “corroboration” of a document that has fallen apart bit by bit ever since its January 2017 publication by BuzzFeed News.

Burying CNN’s full dossier history on the network’s platforms is becoming something of a trend. On Thursday, CNN.com published reporter Marshall Cohen’s extensive retrospective titled “The Steele dossier: A reckoning.” That headline pairs nicely with a nut graph that reads, “Legitimate questions are now being raised about the dossier — how it was used by Democrats as a political weapon against Trump, how it was handled by the FBI and US intelligence agencies, and how it was portrayed in the mainstream media.”

Those words tease the idea that CNN is now administering a dossier reckoning to CNN itself. Nothing close to that comes to fruition. Cohen explains CNN’s role in breaking the news that then-President Barack Obama and Donald Trump were briefed on the dossier during the presidential transition, as well as the network’s February 2017 story that U.S. officials had corroborated certain communications outlined in the document. The piece does point out that a December 2019 Justice Department inspector general report noted that the FBI had corroborated precious little of the dossier’s exclusive material.

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Cohen’s story, however, leaves out how CNN’s top journalists bootstrapped that February 2017 story into sweeping and definitive commentary lending credibility to the entire dossier. One host even said the U.S. intelligence community had “corroborated all the details,” just one of the many remarks that we documented in previous posts. We won’t belabor these errant evaluations anymore here, other than to say that Cohen’s piece didn’t “reckon” with them one bit.

The story, to its credit, clarifies the degree to which the dossier has been discredited, noting official debunkings in the Justice Department inspector general report and the mammoth Senate Intelligence Committee report released in August 2020. “These revelations undermined Steele’s credibility — and led to renewed scrutiny and right-wing criticism of how many news outlets, including CNN, covered the dossier story,” writes Cohen. Ah yes, “right-wing criticism.”

Last Thursday, CNN’s Pamela Brown introduced a package on the dossier’s recent woes with this language: “We decided to take another look at what ultimately became an unreliable partisan-backed political memo that got a lot wrong.”

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Whoa! That assessment has shifted 180 degrees from the one that prevailed during the Trump years, when CNN staffers droned on about all the dossier’s wide-ranging “corroboration.” Yet CNN has pulled off this about-face without so much as a single statement or the slightest mea culpa from management. The Erik Wemple Blog has asked the network, again, about this situation, and hasn’t received a response.

For the moment, CNN appears content to allow its sunny, erstwhile commentary about the Steele dossier to sit alongside its grim, new commentary about the Steele dossier. “Let the viewers figure it out” appears to be the animating idea behind this journalistic abdication. There’s at least one relevant precedent for this approach in CNN’s archives: A 2017 story alleged that U.S. investigators had wiretapped Trump associate Paul Manafort under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). After the inspector general’s report contradicted that story, CNN merely slapped an editor’s note atop the challenged story and walked away.

Under CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker, CNN has pursued a strategy of flooding the network’s copious airtime with one big story after another. That’s what happened with all the Trump-Russia investigations, documents, trials and scuttlebutt — the network gorged on it all. Given Trump’s threat to American democracy, the focus was by no means irrational.

But it wasn’t healthy, either. When you stake your network’s identity on a single story, and part of that story starts to fray, it takes a lot of courage to ’fess up. Courage that CNN appears to lack.