To: Washington Post and New York Times
@washingtonpost, @nytimes: Review Russia reporting after @CNN resignations
Just Foreign Policy
Review your policies on Russia reporting following CNN resignations & reported reforms of CNN Russia coverage.
Why is this important?
Three prominent CNN journalists resigned on June 26 after CNN was forced to retract and apologize for a story linking a Trump ally to a Russian investment fund under congressional investigation. The CNN story had been based on a single anonymous source. An internal investigation by CNN management found that some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published. [1] Buzzfeed reported that CNN has now imposed strict new publishing restrictions for online articles involving Russia. [2]
But as Glenn Greenwald noted at The Intercept, the problem is not limited to CNN:
"CNN is hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false - always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.
Several of the most humiliating of these episodes have come from the Washington Post... In sum, anything is fair game when it comes to circulating accusations about official U.S. adversaries, no matter how baseless, and Russia currently occupies that role. (More generally: The less standing and power one has in official Washington, the more acceptable it is in U.S. media circles to publish false claims about them, as this [3] recent, shockingly falsehood-ridden New York Times article about RT host Lee Camp illustrates; it, too, now contains multiple corrections.)" [4]
Urge the Washington Post and the New York Times to review the standards of their Russia coverage by signing our petition.
References:
1. http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/26/media/cnn-announcement-retracted-article/index.html
2. https://www.buzzfeed.com/passantino/cnn-russia-coverage-publishing-restrictions
3. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/06/lee-camp-write-propaganda-ny-times-demonstrated-article.html
4. https://theintercept.com/2017/06/27/cnn-journalists-resign-latest-example-of-media-recklessness-on-the-russia-threat/