© REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
The New York Times Building in New York ; US soldiers listen to a briefing at forward operating base Gamberi in Afghanistan
published an article claiming that Russia was paying out monetary bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan.
There's just one problem — none of what they reported was true.
As news reporting goes, the
New York Times article alleging that a top-secret unit within Russian military intelligence, or GRU, had offered a bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed in Afghanistan, was dynamite.
The story was quickly "confirmed" by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, and went on to take social media by storm. Twitter was on fire with angry pundits, former officials, and anti-Trump politicians (and their respective armies of followers) denouncing President Trump as a "traitor" and demanding immediate action against Russia.
There was just one problem — nothing in the
New York Times could be corroborated. Indeed, there is no difference between the original reporting conducted by the
New York Times,
and the "confirming" reports published by the
Washington Post and the
Wall Street Journal.
All of the reports contain caveats such as "if confirmed" and "if true," while providing no analysis into the potential veracity of the information used to sustain the report — alleged debriefs of Afghan criminals and militants — or the underpinning logic, or lack thereof, of the information itself.
Comment: See also: