From Russia with Love
Last Tuesday, during the coverage of the confirmation hearings for Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees, CNN broke the news that President Obama and Mr. Trump had been briefed by intelligence officials about claims of Russian efforts to compromise the president-elect:
It mentions that the claims of the report are still investigated by the FBI, but also notes that previous work of the ex-MI6 agent who compiled the report, Christopher Steele (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) is considered credible. (For more information about Steele, see the Telegraph’s extensive portrait)
Buzzfeed then published the report in full, cautioning that the allegations of the report are explosive, but unverified. Additionally, buzzfeed claims that the report has been known to elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks and that buzzfeed published it to give Americans the opportunity to “make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government”.
Following the publication, the internet and the 24-hour news cycle exploded.
Trump, eloquent as ever, claimed the report was “all fake news”, “phony stuff” and “gotten by opponents of ours”. Well, what else was he going to say, regardless of the report’s veracity? Anyways. The claims of the report may never be verified, but the question that remains is: Should CNN and Buzzfeed have published it in the first place?
The controversy of Fake News has been omnipresent during Trump’s campaign and after his election in 2016. The German equivalent of “post-factual” has been awarded the title of “Word of the Year” and the credibility of the press is being questioned by populists in the US as well as in Germany. Now it is 2017, and we start with a bang. Some call the report fake news further tarnishing the reputation of the press; others defend CNN and Buzzfeed for publishing the report, arguing that if the top intelligence chiefs of the country decide to brief the president and the president-elect about it, it is credible enough that the public has a right to know, too.
The report’s claims are still uncorroborated, but maybe Mathew Ingram of Fortune has a good point, saying that only a handful of media organizations entitled to decide what is credible isn’t how journalism works any more. Maybe this is exactly the way to react to the problem of fake news: raising people’s awareness that they have a responsibility to make up their own mind about the news. I don’t think every newspaper or news agency should just stop verifying their information and simply publish what they think (or, worse, feel) is true. But if the veracity of a report can neither be confirmed nor denied and said report is important according to news values, I do think that publishing it with the disclaimer that it has indeed not been verified is preferable to leaving the public in the dark.
