The Trump-Russia Dossier: What Was BuzzFeed Thinking? | Matt Taibbi | Big Think

The golden shower story it's kind of a classic journalistic ethical dilemma. On the one hand, what do you do about a news story that everybody is talking about, but whose factual basis is suspect? As a news organization, you can't really ignore it, but if you cover it at all, you're giving it attention without confirming it, which is kind of not what we're supposed to do in this business.

People who go to journalism school or who have been in this business for a long time, we're kind of inculcated with this idea of the malice standard. We’re not supposed to put anything out there that we know to be untrue or that we don't feel solid about. If we knowingly put something out there in the news that we are unsure of, that's malice; that's the grounds for liable. That's what we're not supposed to do. That's what the law tells us affirmatively that we can't do.

But that's exactly what went on with this BuzzFeed story. They actually openly said in the story: "We have doubts about the veracity of this material, but we're going to put it out there anyway." So now what does everybody do? You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Now it's a news story. It's a phenomenon that everybody is talking about. But if we can't confirm what's in the actual dossier, then how do we talk about it?

And there's an additional problem with the story, which is that the motives of almost everybody involved are suspect. How is this material getting to reporters? Well, we know for sure that it was being shopped around to a number of different journalists in the last five or six months. It started off as opposition research first in the Republican Party and then by the Democrats.

And then there's this other problem where there are these leaks that are emanating from the intelligent services that are trying to foist, I think, on the population this idea that there are links between Russia and Donald Trump. But they're doing it in a way without showing their hand as to what the evidence is for that belief.

As somebody who lived over there for a long time, the dossier reads like the inside of the Kremlin, like a high school cafeteria where you can overhear all these amazing state secrets all the time. I mean, that's just not the way the Russians operate. They run a much tighter ship than that, in my experience. I don't remember ever hearing anybody leaking word of these conversations between Putin and his inner circle back when I was there.

It's just really, really hard for me to imagine that we would get anything out of the Kremlin that they didn't want us to have, which makes it more confusing. Is this a disinformation campaign that's coming from Russia? Or is it totally fabricated by whoever wrote up that dossier? Or are the intelligence services trying to make us think that it's true? I mean, it's a very difficult thing to try to sort out.

But that's exactly the kind of thing we shouldn't be doing: engaging in this guessing game. We should really just stick to what we know. It's exactly, it's like a bad parody of a le Carre novel or something like that.