A reckoning is hitting news organizations for years-old coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document's primary source was charged with lying to the FBI, Axios Media Trends reporter Sara Fischer writes.
Why it matters: It's one of the most egregious errors in modern journalistic history, and the media's response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.
Outsized coverage of the unvetted document drove a media frenzy at the start of Donald Trump's presidency, helping drive a narrative of collusion between former President Trump and Russia.
Post media critic Erik Wemple has written at length about the mistakes made by The Post and other outlets in dossier coverage.
BuzzFeed News, which published the entire dossier in 2017, says it has no plans to take the document down. It's still online, accompanied by a note that says: "The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors."
BuzzFeed defended the decision in a 2018 lawsuit by arguing that because the FBI opened an investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, the dossier itself was newsworthy, whatever the merits of its contents turned out to be. It won that case.
Other outlets that gave the document outsized coverage have so far been less forthcoming.
What to watch: The Steele screwup will undoubtedly cause an even bigger rift in trust between Democrats and Republicans.
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