Washington Post Removes And Corrects Years-Old Articles That Used Discredited Steele Dossier, Axios Says Media Experiencing A Reckoning

The Washington Post has removed and corrected large portions of articles from 2017 and 2019 which relied heavily on the discredited anti-Trump Steele dossier.

The Washington Post has removed and corrected large portions of articles from 2017 and 2019 which relied heavily on the discredited anti-Trump Steele dossier.

The news comes as another key player in the dossier’s ‘research’ has recently been arrested.

Post media reporter Paul Farhi, on a Friday afternoon in mid-November of 2021, explained the newspaper’s reasoning for making wholesale changes to reporting that had stood on their website for years, throughout much of the Donald Trump presidency.

“The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusian American businessman as a key source of the ‘Steele dossier,’ a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump,” Farhi wrote.

“The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story,” he added.

Much of the Steele dossier was unverifiable information that major media outlets used as gospel throughout Trump’s term in office.

RELATED: Durham’s Russia Probe Nabs A Big Fish – ‘Primary’ Figure In Steele Dossier Flap Arrested

Does the Washington Post Deserve Credit for Correcting Steele Dossier Reports?

Axios reported on the Washington Post correcting their Steele dossier articles and notes that its media critic, Erik Wemple, has written at length about the mistakes media outlets made in their coverage of the dossier.

Does the newspaper deserve credit for this move?

The New York Times and the Washington Post, after all, were jointly awarded the Pulitzer for their 2017 coverage of Donald Trump and his alleged ties to Russian operatives duirng the 2016 presidential campaign.

Will they be giving these awards back. Will the Pulitzer organization rescind them?

Will they ever, no matter what course of action they take going forward, make up for the fact that they left a false stain on the Trump administration for four years, one that convinced countless voters that the President of the United States was secretly a Russian asset?

Of course not. The media is as corrupt an insitution as there is in America today.

RELATED: Clinton-Connected Lawyer Who Fed FBI Trump-Russia Conspiracy Information Indicted

Media Reckoning Over the Steele Dossier

Still, Axios is filled with wide-eyed optimism over the hope that the media will have a reckoning over their false reporting on the Steele dossier.

“A reckoning is hitting news organizations for years-old coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document’s primary source was charged with lying to the FBI,” they write.

“It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” they add, but “the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.”

They note that outlets like CNN and MSNBC have refused to comment on whether or not they will make corrections to their reporting as well.

For his part, Wemple has publicly called out CNN who he explains, repeatedly insisted parts of the Steele dossier had been “corroborated.”

“In light of the recent developments, we asked CNN if it still stands by its ‘corroboration’ reporting and, if so, to which specific parts of the dossier does that apply,” Wemple said. “We received no response.”

Did you think the network of Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon would finally grow a spine and admit to their mistakes?

In early November, Igor Danchenko, a key player in the Steele dossier, was arrested as part of a probe by Special Counsel John Durham into the origins of the Russian collusion probe.

Danchenko was described by the New York Times as “the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier.”

Details of the indictment against Igor Danchenko include his arrest on “five counts of making false statements to the FBI.”

One of the allegations includes Danchenko having made a false statement about being in contact with “a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics.”

The arrest of Igor Danchenko comes just one month after the indictment of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer that formerly represented the Democrat National Committee (DNC) and has ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Sussman had provided what was supposed to have shown evidence of secret communications between then-candidate for President Trump and Russia.

The FBI would eventually determine “those concerns had no merit,” the New York Times reported, and Sussmann was indicted on a charge of lying to the FBI when he insisted he wasn’t providing the information on behalf of any client.

The indictment stated that in reality, Sussman knew “he was acting on behalf of specific clients, namely, Tech Executive-1 and the Clinton Campaign.”

Perhaps the media will finally start digging as to how entangled former First Lady Hillary Clinton and her campaign were in paying for foreign opposition research. Perhaps they’ll get legitimate Pulitzer awards when they uncover the true scandal.

 

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Rusty Weiss has been covering politics for over 15 years. His writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, Fox... More about Rusty Weiss

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