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The Steele Dossier: 2,634 Network Minutes on the Russia Story, Zero Seconds for the Source's Indictment

The Russia investigation fueled by the Steele dossier received about 44 hours of evening-news coverage. When special counsel John Durham charged the dossier's main source, the networks gave it nothing, and Durham's 2023 report faulting the FBI got one segment on each evening newscast. The Washington Post corrected over a dozen of its own dossier stories.

Oct 18, 2022
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Whose side it served: Democrats

Silence on the unraveling spared outlets and the Clinton-funded research behind the dossier.

What the record shows

Durham indicted Igor Danchenko in November 2021 for lying to the FBI; Danchenko admitted he supplied about 80% of the dossier's raw intelligence. In November 2021 the Washington Post removed large portions of two stories that had named Sergei Millian as a dossier source and corrected about a dozen others, with editor Sally Buzbee saying the paper could no longer 'stand by the accuracy of those elements.' A jury acquitted Danchenko on all counts on Oct. 18, 2022. Durham's May 15, 2023 report called the FBI's basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane 'seriously flawed' and said investigators had no actual evidence of collusion at the outset. The MRC (Rich Noyes) counted 2,634 minutes of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news on the Russia investigations from Jan. 20, 2017 to July 20, 2019; the MRC later found those broadcasts gave the Danchenko indictment zero seconds through Nov. 8, 2021. On May 15, 2023, each network's evening newscast aired a segment on the Durham report (NewsBusters). The Post's own media critic, Erik Wemple, wrote that a reckoning over dossier coverage was 'years overdue.'

In their words

“Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee: the paper could no longer "stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story."”— · source
The other side

Durham's prosecutions largely failed: two of his three defendants were acquitted and the third got probation, and his report did not produce the wrongdoing Trump had predicted. The 2,634 minutes also covered the Mueller probe, which rested on far more than the dossier, so the ratio partly reflects a bigger story.

Sources

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