There was a certified Donald Trump scandal this week, and it had nothing to do with Russia.
I\u2019m talking of course about the president-elect\u2019s embrace of Robert Kennedy Jr. By benefit of his connections, wealth, and last name, Kennedy has become the most prominent \u201cvaccine skeptic\u201d in America, with the possible exception of Mr. Trump himself.
In a December 18 interview with Face the Nation, a top Trump aide unequivocally denies any contact between Trump’s campaign and the Russian gover…
Kennedy left a meeting with Mr. Trump this week with a bit of a bombshell: That he had been offered the chairmanship of a commission to investigate vaccinations, and that he had accepted. Mr. Trump\u2019s team pushed back a bit on that report, but at this point there can be little doubt that our new president is invested in pushing dangerous vaccine conspiracy theories into the mainstream.
The same day Kennedy met with Mr. Trump, Buzzfeed published the ur-text of the kompromat conspiracy: a document, put together by a retired British spy, filled with juicy unverified information about Mr. Trump, and suggesting that the Russians have video proof, which they are using to blackmail Mr. Trump.
It\u2019s plausible, I suppose. But there are a lot of plausible rumors and reports going around, and that\u2019s the problem. For example, it\u2019s plausible that the intelligence community is doing whatever it can to damage Mr. Trump. Likewise, it\u2019s plausible that the Russians are involved in all sorts of cyber mischief, but that their agenda has less to do with propping up Mr. Trump and is more about promoting paranoia and division within the U. S.
It\u2019s hard to say what\u2019s true and what\u2019s not, in large part because the evidence of Russian hacking that\u2019s been made public so far has amounted to little more than a platter of nothingburgers.
In any event, Buzzfeed\u2019s decision to publish the British spy\u2019s \u201cdossier,\u201d curiously styled to read like an official intelligence report, provoked a fair amount of blowback. And fair enough, because what Buzzfeed did was irresponsible.
The decision to publish the unverified and likely unverifiable document, in the name of transparency, was understandable. As Buzzfeed noted, many journalists had taken a look at it, and there\u2019s an argument that everyone has a right to see this kind of stuff, not only elite journalists.
BuzzFeed has cut their ad ties with the Republican National Committee. The ads in question that caused the termination revolved around Donald Tru…
But the message the document\u2019s publication sent was troubling, which is that a lower standard of evidence will be required when writing negative things about the new president, and that it\u2019s acceptable to treat him more harshly than the press would treat other commanders-in-chief.
If anything, it should worry you more if you dislike Mr. Trump, because an erosion of objectivity will only benefit him politically. It\u2019s no secret that political journalists tend left , a fact Mr. Trump consistently exploits to sow doubt about the many credible news reports that raise real questions about his fitness for office.
Yet that might not be the worst concern, as we saw this week. Mr. Trump is a moving target, and obviously there\u2019s a lot to question him about. At the same time, the press needs to realize that there\u2019s a limited amount of information news consumers are able to process.
That means picking targets. And this unverifiable tale of Russian spies is precisely not the kind we should be choosing.
Mr. Trump gave a press conference on Wednesday, and sure enough, vaccines did not come up once. That\u2019s not the fault of the reporters who were there \u2013 the Buzzfeed story, combined with the concurrent confirmation hearings, had gobbled up all the available bandwidth.
Still, it\u2019s a shame, because the vaccine issue affects normal people a lot more than the supposed goings-on of the FSB. Spreading resistance to mandatory vaccinations, a phenomenon that\u2019s largely been relegated to the far-left and far-right extremes, is thought to be responsible for an uptick in preventable diseases like measles, particularly among children.
Now we have a president-elect who subscribes to their conspiracy theories, and it\u2019s easy to imagine his very vocal skepticism and embrace of people like Kennedy will make a bad situation worse. And it isn\u2019t just Kennedy, either: Andrew Wakefield, the leader of the anti-vaccine movement, met with Mr. Trump during the campaign, and described their conversation in disturbingly positive terms.
\u201cI found him to be extremely interested, genuinely interested, and open-minded on this issue, so that was enormously refreshing,\u201d Wakefield told STAT, a health news journal, last month.
Pegy Lowery lost her 12-year-old daughter, Piper, to the flu. She joins CBSN with an urgent and emotional message for parents to vaccinate their…
Many parents agonize over whether to vaccinate their children , and it should be the role of the government to make the right decision easier. There\u2019s no evidence that vaccines cause autism, and even if they did in some small number of cases, vaccinations would still be necessary to protect the population at large.
This is particularly true when it comes to small children, the elderly, the malnourished, and the already sick \u2013 the kind of people for whom something like measles could be a death sentence.
It\u2019s a truism in digital journalism \u2013 one that I believe was coined by Buzzfeed\u2019s great editor, Ben Smith \u2013 the gist of which is that while the internet offers endless space for stories, readers do not have endless time. It\u2019s part of the job of journalists to decide which stories are important, and which stories are less so.
The Russian blackmail story, should it ever be proven, may be the most important story of the century. But until we know a lot more than we do, it\u2019s a safe bet that the new president\u2019s coddling of vaccine deniers is a more immediate, and worrying, concern.<\/p>\n

\n

\nSimilarity rank: 7.9\n<\/div>\n

Sentiment rank: 0<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n