Fake news: the establishment media devours itself over the dossier

After the 2016 election the largest television networks and newspapers adopted a phrase for the websites that had eaten into their audience: fake news. There was plenty of it on the alternative sites, which often ran what worked for them with little checking, and the campaign against them followed a familiar pattern, the same phrase repeated across every outlet at once until it became a fact. What the campaign did not anticipate was how quickly the phrase would be turned around. This page records the week in January 2017 when it was.

The dossier

On 10 January CNN reported that intelligence chiefs had briefed both the outgoing president and the president-elect on a two-page summary of allegations, compiled by a former British intelligence officer, that Russia held compromising material on Donald Trump. CNN did not publish the allegations, saying they were unverified. Within hours BuzzFeed published the entire 35-page document, with a note that it contained errors and that its claims were unconfirmed. The most lurid of them concerned a Moscow hotel room, and it was that detail, not the intelligence briefing, that the public heard.

CNN’s position was that it had reported only the fact of the briefing, which was news, and not the contents, which were not. The difficulty was that the report named the document, described its origin, and pointed anyone with two clicks to the copy BuzzFeed had put online. Its own headline said the material showed Trump in a “compromised” relationship with Russia, and its summary said the intelligence community found the source “credible”, a characterisation the agencies did not adopt.

The competitors turn

What made the week unusual was who said so. MSNBC argued on air that CNN was as responsible as BuzzFeed for giving the dossier its publicity. CBS said outright that Trump was right to criticise CNN’s role and called the network one of the great purveyors of fake news. BuzzFeed’s editor, Ben Smith, said his outlet had at least owned what it published, while CNN wrote headlines about a document it claimed not to have amplified. Anderson Cooper spent an evening repeating that CNN had not published the unsubstantiated allegation, to an adviser of the president-elect who kept asking what the headline had been for. The caviar defence, as it was put here: we did not put the poison in it, we only told everyone where the buffet was.

The press conference

On 11 January the president-elect held his first press conference since the election, refused a question from CNN’s correspondent, and said to him, on camera, “You are fake news.” A phrase invented two months earlier to police the alternative press had been fixed, by the incoming president, to the network that had used it most. The panel on one daytime programme said they were terrified. The establishment press, which had spent the campaign describing Breitbart as an anti-Semitic site without mentioning that it had been founded by a Jewish writer, found that the president would take questions from Breitbart and not from them.

What the week showed

There were two fake-news problems in January 2017, and only one of them was on the alternative sites. The other was a mainstream practice of reporting on a report, so that a claim nobody would print could be circulated by describing the fact that someone else had printed it, with the imprimatur of a serious network and none of the responsibility. The dossier was the clearest case, and the networks’ own competitors said so, which is why it belongs in the record.

Later note. The dossier’s central allegations were never substantiated. In December 2019 the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI had relied on it in surveillance applications while its own sources were disputing it, and in 2021 its primary sub-source was charged with lying to the FBI. The phrase “fake news” outlived all of this and belongs, in 2026, to everyone and no one.