© New York Times
Seeking to maintain its credibility,
The New York Times dispenses with the criminal justice system and basic principles of journalism to weigh in again on Russia-gate, reports Joe Lauria.
We've seen it before: a newspaper and individual reporters get a story horribly wrong
but instead of correcting it they double down to protect their reputations and credibility - which is all journalists have to go on - and the public suffers.
Sometimes this maneuver can contribute to a massive loss of life. The most egregious example was the reporting in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Like nearly all Establishment media,
The New York Times got the story of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - the major casus belli for the invasion - dead wrong. But the
Times, like the others,
continued publishing stories without challenging their sources in authority, mostly unnamed, who were pushing for war.
The result was a disastrous intervention that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and continued instability in Iraq, including the formation of the Islamic State.
In a massive
Times article published on Thursday, entitled, "A Plot to Subvert an Election: Unravelling the Russia Story So Far,"
it seems that reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti have succumbed to the same thinking that doubled down on Iraq. They claim to have a "mountain of evidence" but what they offer would be invisible on the Great Plains.
Comment: Steele is small fry compared to Stefan Halper. How much will the documents reveal about him, and about Alexander Downer for that matter?