‘The Russians Paid Bounties to The Taliban to Kill US Troops,’ Screamed The NYTimes. Now It Quietly Admits There’s, Erm, Zero Evidence

• ‘The Russians Paid Bounties to The Taliban to Kill US Troops,’ Screamed The NYTimes. Now It Quietly Admits There’s, Erm, Zero Evidence
  by Ben Aris, bne IntelliNews, via https://www.rt.com/
  Is this how journalism is supposed to work in America? That you can make – or, more accurately, make up – lurid allegations, and then keep running with them even when there’s no proof at all?
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  What does a newspaper do when it publishes a supposed “bombshell” story and then discovers that, erm, there is actually zero evidence for it?
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  Well, if you are the New York Times, it appears that you quietly bury a story admitting to this on page 19 – but make it so opaque that even the most diligent reader would be unlikely to make it to the last paragraph, which is where, ever so quietly, you make your confession.
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  It was bad enough that their original story – alleging that US intelligence agencies believed payments were made by the Russian foreign military intelligence GRU to Afghan fighters as “bounties” for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan – was based on anonymous sources.
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  Then we had to endure other mainstream media outlets picking up the story, after apparently having it confirmed by other anonymous sources. As one veteran military writer in the US succinctly put it, “I’m not sure that anonymous sources confirming what other anonymous sources said actually proves anything.”
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  Finally, seven days after its ‘scoop’, the NYT ran another story on the subject, entitled ‘New Administration Memo Seeks to Foster Doubts About Suspected Russian Bounties’, which was published on July 3 and buried in the bowels of the paper.
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  Its opening paragraphs sought to back up the original story, claiming that an intelligence memo had said the “… CIA and the National Counterterrorism Centre had assessed with medium confidence – meaning creditable sources and plausible, but falling short of near certainty – that a unit of the Russian military service, known as the GRU, offered the bounties.”
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  ‘No explicit evidence’
  It was only in the last paragraph that the real story – that there was no story – was revealed: “The agency did intercept data of financial transactions that provide circumstantial support for the detainee’s account, but the agency does not have explicit evidence that the money was bounty payments.”
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  Let me just repeat this: “… the agency does not have explicit evidence that the money was bounty payments.”
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  read more.

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