It’s bulls**t.
President-elect Donald Trump didn’t pay prostitutes to urinate on his bed in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow, three years ago.
Neither did Trump do this to deliberately defile a bed that had been used by Barack and Michelle Obama.
And nor did Vladimir Putin secretly videotape the whole thing to use as blackmail against Trump at a later date.
It’s all complete baloney.

Horribly damaging, deeply offensive baloney which will of course have caused huge distress to Trump, his wife Melania, and their wider families.
That is my considered verdict on Watergate Scandal No2.
How can I be so sure?
First, Trump has categorically, furiously, emphatically denied it.
(His ‘I’m a germaphobe’ defense alone at today’s press conference is pretty compelling, given I’ve personally seen him recoil from shaking hands many times).
Second, the Russians and Putin himself have equally categorically, furiously, emphatically denied it.

snip

As Trump said at his press conference, every high profile person who goes to Russia is warned that Russian intelligence agencies routinely bug hotel rooms in big cities like Moscow and St Petersburg precisely to amass such potentially damaging material with which to blackmail people.
He may be many things, but he’s not stupid.

What I think we’re dealing with here is a variant on the legendary story, also involving pigs, about Lyndon Johnson when he was running for president.
Concerned about the race getting close, he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumour about his opponent having sex with a pig.
‘Christ, we can’t call him a pig-f***er!’ the campaign manager protested. ‘Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.’
‘I know,’ said Johnson. ‘But let’s make the sonafab*tch deny it!’

Trump has now had to publicly deny paying prostitutes to urinate for him. A claim that was made, it has emerged, by unnamed people who had been specifically tasked with unearthing damaging information about a political rival.
That damage is now mostly done, and it’s outrageous given it’s almost certainly untrue.

‘Publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017,’ said Ben Smith, someone I know well, and respect, from my time at CNN when he was a regular guest on my show.

Really, Ben?

Then frankly, we’re all truly going to hell in a handcart.

Because if the new journalism is simply publishing whatever comes across your newsdesk, without any independent proof that it’s true, then that’s not journalism – it’s exactly as Trump called it today: ‘cr*p.’

Or to put it more politely, it’s another blazing log on the ugly bonfire currently fuelling ‘fake news’.
I am more sensitive than most to this phenomenon as an alleged form of it once cost me my job.
I ran British newspaper Daily Mirror for a decade and was fired in 2004 for publishing supposedly fake photographs of British troops abusing Iraqi civilians. (The Mirror had vociferously opposed the Iraq War).

snip

My former employers CNN, who first reported yesterday on the dossier, but crucially didn’t include the details of the specific allegations, are not as culpable as Trump believes in all this, but they’re not blameless either.

They gave an official gloss to a dossier that looks extremely flimsy and full of wild badly-sourced allegations, thus making it seem more important and accurate than it was, and of course, prompting Buzzfeed into running with the full works.
And the real villain here is whoever leaked it to Buzzfeed and other media in the first place, if the motivation was purely to damage Trump at the expense of the truth, particularly if that person works for the US intelligence community.

The stakes are very high here.

A free press is the very cornerstone of any democracy.
If fake news goes mainstream like this, without any checks and balances, then the pivotal place of the free press in American culture will be over, toast, defunct, kaput.

So shame on you, Buzzfeed.
As Trump said at his press conference, what you did to him was ‘an absolute disgrace’.
And that’s a fact


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