"Plenty of people need to answer for their embrace of the Steele dossier — the FBI, James Comey, Adam Schiff, Christopher Steele himself. A number of media outlets need to provide accountability, especially Buzzfeed for its inexplicable decision to publish what turned out to be a salacious package mostly consisting of rumor as misinformation. But when it comes to the worst offender, Erik Wemple* declared yesterday, no one surpasses MSNBC’s biggest prime-time host.
“Name a host on cable news who has dug more deeply into Trump-Russia than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow,” Wemple writes. And no one got it more wrong, either — and no one ran as fast from it when it fell apart. “She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings,” Wemple concludes, “a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”
"It began with the Buzzfeed publication of the dossier, fueled by the absence-of-evidence fallacy:
Sorting through the silence from the FBI and the unverified claims in the dossier, Maddow riffed on her Jan. 13, 2017, program: “I mean, had the FBI looked into what was in that dossier and found that it was all patently false, they could tell us that now, right?” said Maddow. “I mean, the dossier has now been publicly released. If the FBI looked into it and they found it was all trash, there’s no reason they can’t tell us that now. They’re not telling us that now. They’re not saying that. They’re not saying anything.”That line of analysis has gained some important context via the Horowitz report. The FBI did, in fact, find “potentially serious problems” with Steele’s reporting as early as January 2017. A source review in March 2017 “did not make any findings that would have altered that judgment.”
"So why didn’t the FBI admit that publicly, as Maddow apparently expected?" . . .
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