Blame today’s ‘digital gas leak’ for latest Trump scandal
Jan 12, 2017, 6:24 AM | Updated: 8:51 am
At his news conference, President-elect Donald Trump complimented media outlets that didn’t publish a raw intelligence report with unproven allegations.
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But that kind of restraint doesn’t mean much anymore.
The unproven, 35-page intelligence report on Trump — which broke Tuesday night — was circulating, unpublished, for months on Capitol Hill as it turns out. Several reporters tweeted that it had been offered to them, but they turned it down. Senator John McCain told CBS’S Nancy Cordes it was also given to him.
“Why do you think they came to you?” Cordes asked.
“I have no idea,” McCain said.
“Do you find the information credible?” Cordes asked.
“I don’t know, that’s why I gave it to the FBI. I don’t know if it’s credible or not, but the information I thought deserved to be delivered to the FBI, the appropriate agency of government,” McCain responded.
And it sat there, safely out of the public eye, until news organizations caught wind that the president and president-elect were briefed about it. Even then they only reported on the briefing but withheld the details. However, once Buzzfeed decided to put all 35 pages on the Internet all efforts at restraint became meaningless.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone. The power of news organizations to suppress uncomfortable stories ended a long time ago — Jan. 17, 1998 to be precise, when the Drudge Report published a story that Newsweek had decided to withhold. It was a story involving one Monica Lewinsky.
And all you have to do is look at the relative fortunes of those two publications to understand why Buzzfeed decided to take the plunge.
And while it may be as Mr. Trump said, disgraceful, this kind of freedom is also the reason he’s about to become president. The birther story that helped build his political brand would’ve gone nowhere back in the day when the New York Times set the agenda. Nor would so many of his speeches have been broadcast live.
But now that sites like Buzzfeed and Breitbart and Drudge have the same access to the public, it’s publish or perish.
Today’s Internet is pretty much a digital gas leak, waiting for a match. And there’s not much the fire department can do but clean up afterward.
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