Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote Thursday that the liberal cable news star “rooted for” British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, which served as the basis for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Trump campaign official Carter Page, to be the smoking gun that would force the president out of office.
In an op-ed titled, “Rachel Maddow rooted for the Steele dossier to be true. Then it fell apart,” Wemple wrote, “She seemed to be rooting for the document.” He added, “As part of her Russianist phase, Maddow became a clearinghouse for news increments regarding the dossier.”
Wemple’s piece was part of a serialized post-mortem on the media’s handling of the Steele dossier, since thoroughly debunked by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.
Erik Wemple over at the Washington Post gave Rachel Maddow a good honest slapdown for her dishonest reporting on the Trump dossier. From the Blaze:
When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found other topics more compelling.She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.
Although some of the breathless reporting on the Trump dossier from the right has been a little nutty, it can no longer be denied that anyone who tried to present the entire dossier as true was just plain wrong.
And as he notes, all of a sudden there’s nothing to be said about the dossier, she just moved right along without admitting to her dim-witted and tiny audience that she might have been misleading them all along…
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