BuzzFeed Might Have Actually Been Correct To Publish The Trump “Dodgy Dossier”

Ben Smith has offered a rationale for BuzzFeed’s publication last night of a “dodgy dossier” alleging that Trump had wild sex escapades in a Moscow hotel. It’s worth listening to in full:

As new information has come out, and I’ve thought about it more, I’ve revised my view somewhat on the propriety of this. Just to be clear, I never came out and definitively declared that BuzzFeed ought not to have released the document, but last night and this morning I did express apprehensions about the journalistic utility of the publication. I still think those apprehensions are well-grounded.

However, for a variety of reasons, I now think the case for publication is a stronger than I initially considered. That’s not to say I would’ve personally published it — I just recognize the case as reasonable in certain respects, which are worth briefly discussing here.

• First, the publication of the document clearly led to the emergence of additional information around its provenance and the chronology of its compilation. Namely, the Wall Street Journal has just revealed the name of the British “corporate spy” who wrote it. When David Corn reported on various snippets and innuendos drawn from the document back in October, he was too cowardly to insist on the source being identified. And because Corn didn’t divulge the primary source material, his “reporting” took on an air of unwarranted authority. Ironically, Corn comes out of this looking a lot worse than BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed’s publication of the document allowed everyone to see for themselves how fundamentally preposterous it is, while Corn concealed the document from the public and kept it to himself, or at least was needlessly cagey about the nature of the material.
• I still think that it’s possible that the ultimate, overall “net impact” of this story is that more people believe false information than before. But should the “net impact” of a story in that respect be determinative of whether it ought to be published? Probably not. It’s one consideration, but it probably can’t be solely determinative. Something can be worth publishing even if the “net impact” is that more people than before believe false information — so long as some other journalistic purpose is served. The other journalistic purpose served here would be along the lines of, “The public ought to be able to see this document being circulated at the highest levels of Government. We possess this document, so why do I (Ben Smith) get to see it, but the general public does not? I no longer have any tenable rationale to withhold this document, and deprive the public of the opportunity to view it for themselves.”
• Huge numbers of people are already primed to believe the worst possible stories about Trump, and that was going to be true whether or not BuzzFeed published the document. There might be some adverse consequences to publishing the document — casual news consumers take it at face value and ignore the various qualifications accompanying it — but BuzzFeed or any other outlet can’t base its publishing decisions solely on that factor. Whether to publish something is a multifaceted decision, with various factors that must be weighed.
• I still think that the way in which this story was initially promulgated on social media was by in large bad, disinformative, and condemnation-worthy. Example:

That tweet is just way too devoid context to be justifiable. Most people who glance at it will see that it cites some unnamed “Report” — which sounds vaguely Authoritative and Serious — and therefore assume the info is credible. There is no link to click through to. That’s another ethical consideration that I think needs to be weighed: large segments of the population will consume news like this entirely through Twitter-based excerpts, which then make their way to Facebook and elsewhere. They’ll never click through to the original article, which contains all the requisite clarifications. (Although, I actually don’t think BuzzFeed was forceful enough with its qualifications in the original article — disclaimers noting the dubiousness of the document could’ve been much more prominently featured.)

Then there’s the question of when precisely it was no longer justifiable for Ben Smith or other journalists to conceal this document from the public. You could argue that once CNN reported the document had been presented to Obama and/or Trump, that crossed a “newsworthiness threshold” and compelled publication by BuzzFeed. But why wasn’t the threshold “crossed” earlier? We know John McCain received the document and transmitted it to James Comey sometime last month. McCain and Comey are both extremely powerful government officials. I don’t know whether Smith was aware that McCain and Comey possessed the document in early December. But if Smith had been aware, would that information have been enough to cross the “newsworthiness threshold” and thereby compel publication? Why or why not? Is the threshold really only “crossed” when you get to the absolute highest level, i.e. Trump/Obama? That can’t be.

All this raises a lot of interesting questions that need to be sorted out. The ethics behind when to publish something that is almost certainly false is sort of a new “field” in journalism and I don’t blame anyone for not yet having a fully-formed picture of the contours of the dilemma.

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Update: It looks as though the full BuzzFeed dossier was not presented to Trump and/or Obama — they apparently received it in some other form. So, this complicates the aforementioned “newsworthiness threshold” question.

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