The original source of this madness was Steele, and the media and political figures who leaned with all their might into this phony narrative — especially the ones who knew it originated as Clinton campaign research — should be as embarrassed as the newspapers and news networks who pushed the WMD hunt.
This obviously hasn’t happened, as the instinct instead has been to apply the Scarlet Letter of conspiracy theory to those who didn’t buy this nonsense, usually on the grounds that any effort to “discredit” Steele is just pro-Trumpism by another name.
This has nothing to do with Trump, and everything to do with restoring controls that are supposed to exist to prevent the press from leading the public off the deep end.
The WMD affair showed what happens when we don’t require sources to show us evidence, when we let political actors use the press to “confirm” their own assertions, when we report on the journey of rumors instead of the rumors themselves, and most especially when we lionize intelligence and law enforcement figures, who usually turn out to be just as craven and unreliable as the rest of us.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member