Amid all the furious debate on the political impact of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony, one thing stands out: The biggest loser is the elite media.
Comey said outright what we asserted at the time: A New York Times story about alleged Trump team contacts with Russian officials was “in the main . . . not true.”
The Feb. 14 report claimed that intercepted phone calls showed “repeated contacts” between people close to not-yet-President Trump and Russian intelligence officials at a rate that “alarmed” US officials. Yet it relied completely on anonymous sources.
As we warned then, “Hostile, hysterical reporting based on anonymous leaks provides no hard facts” — but plenty of outright errors.
(Thus CNN’s latest correction: Citing its own anonymous sources, it reported days ago that Comey would refute Trump’s claim that the then-director assured him he wasn’t under investigation. In fact, Comey testified, “I offered that assurance” — three times, just as Trump said. Oops.)
The root problem with anonymity is that readers had to trust the Times that its Feb. 14 sources knew what they were talking about. And Comey says they didn’t.
As he put it, reporters writing about classified information “often don’t really know what’s going on and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it.” In all, he said, “many, many stories” in recent months were “just dead wrong.”
Yet such accounts can win you fame. One of the three Feb. 14 bylines was Matt Apuzzo, co-author of an error-riddled (but Pulitzer-winning) Associated Press series that smeared the NYPD’s Intelligence Division.
Thursday night, the Times posted a response to Comey’s testimony by Apuzzo and the other two Feb. 14 reporters, complaining that the former FBI director hadn’t said specifically what they got wrong. Then it cited (mostly anonymous) sources as confirming elements of the original account.
But this leaves the paper with a big problem: If it believes Comey’s not telling the truth here, how can it consider him trustworthy on everything else?
If readers believe Comey’s right to call the Times story “not true,” how can they trust any of the paper’s other anonymously sourced accounts?
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