Hand in the canard pot

Le November 4, in the United States, one of the most explosive revelations of the decade definitely gained the radius of fake news official. That day, Mr. Igor Danchenko, one of the main sources of a file describing Mr. Donald Trump as a puppet in the hands of Mr. Vladimir Putin, was charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Kremlin would hold compromising videos of the US president filmed with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, he argued in 2016 in a crucial testimony, telling investigators to keep this secret from an associate of Mr. Trump well established in Moscow. However, a current judicial investigation suggests that his informant was in fact a close friend of Mrs. Hillary Clinton …

Posted on January 10, 2017 by the Buzzfeed News site, the “ Steele report So named after the compiler of this gossip, has inspired thousands of top publications on the planet to write thousands of articles based on the very type of conspiratorial scenario they usually pride themselves on refuting. Except that, this time, the conspiracy theory – Mr. Trump manipulated by Mr. Putin – reinforced their prejudices. (1). The arrest of Mr Danchenko confuses the liberal press. The document that fueled so many investigations, some of which won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018, was based on “ exaggerations, rumors and outright lies “, admit it Washington post (November 5). Since then, “ some reports published on the issue by the media, including the Washington Post, find themselves in doubt “. Put bluntly, the articles were so heavily loaded with unverified gossip that the managing editor took the extraordinary decision to rewrite a dozen of them after the fact …

Also took the feather in the jar of tales, the New York Times subcontracts his mea culpa to a journalism professor. “ The distinction between what journalists assume and what we verify is often the difference between fiction and reality. “, recalls Bill Grueskin (November 15). In both cases, the awkward rectifications take up only a tiny fraction of the space devoted to fake news of the Steele report. If ultraconservatives gloat, very few progressive readers will know that one of the most commented cases of Mr. Trump’s tenure was simply bogus …

In France, their number promises to be even smaller. Twenty days after this Pearl Harbor of journalism, alone The Express (November 18) and the site of Paris Match (November 4) mentioned the name of Mr. Danchenko. Impossible to incriminate the distraction, so much the Parisian editorialists refer with deference to the New York Times and at Washington Post. “ The two dailies fought a healthy editorial battle, pulling the two titles up significantly in terms of quality of content. “, marveled the media specialist of France Inter, Sonia Devillers (May 13, 2021), who did not breathe a word of their recent collapse. We are impatiently awaiting the verdict of the patented anti-conspirators: at the time of going to press, neither the auditors of Release, nor the decoders of the World, neither the Observatory of conspiracy, nor the weekly program “ Antidote On France Inter had not commented on the collapse of the biggest conspiratorial bellows in recent years.