A Question of Fact

In law enforcement there are some things an investigator can determine, and there are some things they have to surmise.  The latter is not guessing - it comes from collecting evidence,  leading to a conclusion.  It can be circumstantial, i.e. indirectly leading to a proof of guilt, or direct, where there is some physical evidence found at the scene.

I had reason to question how this kind of evidence is collected in the reporting by journalists, when twice this week, stories have come out that turned out to be questions of fact.  Journalists are not usually investigators, per se, but they do have a professional responsibility to verify what they publish.  They don’t have to verify that it is true, but they do have to verify that it was said by someone they can point to as a source.  That means they cannot just make things up and publish those things as facts.  

In one story, a journalist says that Michael Flynn, the former national Security Adviser to President Trump was going to testify that the President told him to speak to the Russians.  There were stories based on this “fact” that compared the conduct of the President to treason, a big stretch for anyone paying attention.  Presidents do this every day in some area of national security, so there is almost no chance that this kind of conduct rises o that level, but it sells clicks on a website somewhere.  

The second story is that Deutsche Bank got a subpoena for records on the Trump family accounts there.  Yesterday, the White House in a press conference, and later in comments by the White House attorney engaged for Russia investigation, denied this happened.  Today’s front page of he Wall Street Journal says it did happen, quoting nobody in particular.  

With questions of fact, they are either true or they are not.  It doesn’t make sense that these kinds of stories can present themselves without some basis for them, and it appears that journalists are not going a very good job of verifying their own facts before they publish.  Somebody is feeding this kind of story to journalists who listen and publish without doing any kind of fact checking or due diligence.  To ABC’s credit, they suspended Brian Ross and took him off cases involving the White House.  He still has a job, but his case is a warning to other reporters that they have to be more careful with their sources. They should be looking for where he got that original piece of information and finding out how it came to Ross.  The Russians are accused of doing a lot of things in the run up to the U.S. national election, but as I have often said, they haven’t stopped just because the election is over.  We need to trace some of these fabrications back to their source and name names.  It might make a better story than the ones being made up.