MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Take the seeming efforts by the former president's team to block last year's election results - the press has to address this, I think. And I think it hurts journalists right now who are investigating other possible wrongdoing by Trump for which there's far greater evidence.

When you get the facts wrong, when you contribute to misunderstanding, that was unfair to Trump and his supporters, as well as to the facts. And the Steele report drove a lot of conversation and coverage for years. But no one ever found any proof of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And you can base that on the bipartisan Senate Intelligence report. The Russians did interfere in the elections and Trump denied it. Trump wanted help from the Russians against Hillary Clinton. He had questionable business dealings there. This didn't prompt special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigations. It doesn't fundamentally change our understanding of Trump and his relationship to Russia. MARTÍNEZ: But, David, why does all this matter?įOLKENFLIK: Let's be clear. The Steele report drove a lot of coverage, and I don't think you've seen news organizations sufficiently wrestle with that. All of which plays into Trump's claims that the press was out to get him. But let's be fair, this network also invited on lawmakers and others who invoked its themes. MSNBC and CNN gave a ton of airtime to former intelligence officials they had hired as pundits who gave it credence while NPR stayed away from specifics because it couldn't verify them. Think of McClatchy, which - the owner of the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and other major metro newspapers, that news organization hasn't retracted two separate stories claiming Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Kremlin agents in Prague. He said it was in the public's interest to know what federal officials were worried about, even while noting that its allegations hadn't been verified. In January 2017, then-BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith posted the entire document. In 2016, the question of the Steele dossier was bouncing around journalistic and national security circles. What are some of the others?įOLKENFLIK: Well, look, there are examples of specific stories, and then there's just the sheer volume of it. MARTÍNEZ: And that's far from the only example of flawed reporting, David. And The Post's new executive editor, Sally Buzbee, acknowledges it contradicts some of the previous reports. The Post, ABC News and The Journal are revisiting those past stories. Federal prosecutors now say that Danchenko never spoke to that Russian figure and that he also relied on a PR consultant with ties to the Clintons who was spreading gossip. Each identified a Russian business figure with ties to Trump as the main source for Danchenko, seemingly giving the dossier greater credibility. What does this mean for news stories that relied on his claims?įOLKENFLIK: Well, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News and The Washington Post had explicitly based some reporting on Danchenko's claims in the dossier. MARTÍNEZ: Now, the Justice Department has charged that key source for the dossier, Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, with lying the FBI.

They looked shaky as time moved forward and have since been discredited, yet they echoed for several years.

And a lot of the specific accusations in the dossier were even denied at the time. This dossier was misused by FBI agents to surveil a U.S. The dossier alleged the Trump campaign was also conspiring with Russia in the 2016 election to damage Hillary Clinton. And it claimed that Russia had cultivated Trump as a target for years and that the Russians were likely blackmailing him. It was put together by a former British intelligence official for a consulting firm hired by Democrats. So the dossier included a lot of accusations about Trump, a lot of salacious accusations about Trump's sex life. David, remind us about the dossier and the role it played in the 2016 race.ĭAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Right. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins us now to talk about this. It follows the indictment of a key source for the Steele dossier, the infamous opposition research into possible links between Trump and Russia. Some of the nation's leading news organizations are revisiting coverage of allegations against candidate and then President Donald Trump.

Fake dossier