Search Results for: dossiad
March 13, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I think it would be a mistake to ignore Jane Mayer’s 15,000 word New Yorker profile of Christopher Steele. Perhaps it will be overtaken by the forthcoming congressional committee reports, but it may stand to serve its intended purposes stand until the Mueller project comes to fruition. Doing their bit to keep the narrative alive, MSNBC and NPR provided Mayer a forum to tout her work shortly after publication last
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March 10, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Jane Mayer’s 15,000-word New Yorker profile of Christopher Steele is a sort of mash note to the man Mayer views as an intergalactic hero. One doesn’t need to be a sophisticated reader to see that she has fallen for the guy big time or that she reveals herself to be an unreliable narrator. For reasons I suggested yesterday in part 3, I think Steele made himself a willing dupe of
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March 9, 2018 — Scott Johnson
It is the burden of Jane Mayer’s 15,000-word New Yorker profile of Christopher Steele to keep hope alive in the veracity of his dossier. To do so, Mayer whips up the ardor of a smitten teenager in the flush of first love. One can almost feel Mayer’s hormones raging. Given the comic book portrait of Steele as the mighty would-be savior of the republic, the thing should have been titled
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March 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Jane Mayer’s 15,000-word New Yorker profile of Christopher Steele reads in part like the stuff of breathless teen girl fan magazines of old — Tiger Beat, say, or 16. Mayer presents Steele as a left-liberal heartthrob. She has fallen for the guy and she wants you to fall for him too. The profile also reads like the tendentious brief of an extraordinarily dishonest lawyer — perhaps a lawyer who has
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March 7, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Former British spy Christopher Steele worked with Fusion GPS principal Glenn Simpson to get the contents of Steele’s dossier into the media before the 2016 election. Byron York reported that Steele personally briefed reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the New Yorker, and Yahoo, all to little or no effect. Mother Jones’s David Corn gave the received version of Steele’s story on October 31 in “A veteran
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December 29, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The Steele/Trump dossier gave critical support to claims of Russian collusion with the Trump presidential campaign. It seems to have served as the predicate for the FBI counterintelligence investigation of Trump campaign associates. Then FBI Director James Comey briefed President Trump on the contents of the dossier before his inauguration in January. BuzzFeed posted the dossier online. When President Trump fired Comey, Comey engineered the appointment of his friend Robert
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May 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
John Durham’s detailed report on the Russia hoax should destroy the (positive) reputation of the FBI. It is devastating. One has to go beyond the four corners of the report to assess the impact it should have on the (positive) reputation of the establishment press, though its positive reputation has been crumbling for decades. The press was of course an integral part of the Russia hoax all along the way.
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February 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Former New York Times investigative reporter Jeff Gerth has written a lengthy retrospective on the coverage of the Trump presidency and the award-winning journalism supporting the Russia hoax in particular. Indeed, we regularly mocked the coverage of the Russia hoax, as in my five-part mock epic Dossiad ridiculing the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. It is useful to have Gerth’s 24,000-word series as published in four parts by the Columbia Journalism
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December 3, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray debated Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg on the proposition “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media.” Taibbi and Murray took the affirmative, i.e., the mainstream media are not to be trusted. The event took place this past Wednesday under the auspices of the Munk Debates in Toronto, Canada. Before undertaking his dive into the Twitter Files, Taibbi wrote it up here at his Substack site
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November 10, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The New York Post has an excellent editorial “Anatomy of a media hit job — how press pushed Clinton’s lies against Trump.” The editorial identifies the players, traces the whisper campaign that planted the Russia hoax in the press, and follows the states of the story from hysteria to the current silence and revisionism. The Washington Post was of course a key “player” in the media lineup. Post media critic
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October 21, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Lee Smith places the disgrace of Jeffrey Toobin into the context of the New Yorker’s political project in the Spectator USA column “Jeffrey Toobin’s stroke of misfortune” (“He is not the first journalist to get overexcited about ‘coup porn’”). Lee painted the big media picture out of which it emerged in the Tablet column “Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth.” Lee’s Spectator column made me think back
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December 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Several renowned journalists published hagiographic profiles of Christopher Steele as some kind of a savior: Howard Blum, John Cassidy, and, preeminently, Jane Mayer come to mind, among many others. Mayer wrote a ludicrous 15,000-word profile of Steele that appeared in the March 5, 2018 number of the New Yorker. I mocked Mayer’s profile of Steele in a five-part series that I called “Jane Mayer’s Dossiad.” The link is to part
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October 4, 2019 — Scott Johnson
What does it mean to disparage the case that Ilhan Omar married her brother in 2009 as a “conspiracy theory”? We saw in part 1 that the Daily Beast, the New Yorker and others have dismissed it by resort to this term or term. Benjamin Wallace-Wells characterizes it as such in his New Yorker profile of Omar. Perhaps nothing more about the profile of Omar need be said than this:
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March 15, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Once upon a time the New Yorker was justly famous for its long-form journalism. In 1946 it published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” In 1966 it published Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” In 1968 it published Edward Jay Epstein’s “Garrison,” a personal favorite of mine. The New Yorker’s reputation is not just based on history. It continues to publish distinguished long-form journalism. I think, for example, of John Colapinto’s 2013 article “Giving
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January 3, 2018 — Scott Johnson
In the editorial “A moment of contempt,” the Wall Street Journal notes that today is the deadline set by the House Intelligence Committee for the Department of Justice and FBI to turn over documents related to the Steele/Trump dossier purporting to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Journal adds that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray have had the subpoenas since August 24,
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