Mainstream media outlets will have a difficult time explaining their reporting on the infamous anti-Trump “Steele Dossier” following the latest indictment from Special Counsel John Durham, media critics Erik Wemple says.

Durham, who was appointed by former Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the origins of an FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign searching for links to Russian intelligence, last week indicted Igor Danchenko.

Danchenko was a top analyst who contributed heavily to the Steele Dossier, which the FBI used to justify opening an investigation. Durham has now indicted Danchenko for lying to FBI investigators about his sources – one of whom it turns out worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“The Danchenko indictment doubles as a critique of several media outlets that covered Steele’s reports in 2016 and after its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017 … CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the McClatchy newspaper chain and various pundits showered credibility upon the dossier without corroboration — and found other topics to cover when a forceful debunking arrived in December 2019 via a report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz,” Wemple wrote.

The sourcing on the now-discredited dossier was “threadbare in the most charitable of depictions” Wemple says.

He added that the media outlets that breathlessly reported about the contents of the dossier “now face a steep journalistic challenge — that of returning to their source(s) in an effort to back up the original claims that Millian was an unwitting source for the dossier.”

“If that effort doesn’t produce enough evidence to surmount the allegations in the indictment, there’s only one option: Retract the stories. Allowing one version of events to sit awkwardly alongside another — and leaving it to the reader to decide — won’t cut it.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)