Thread by @davidfrum

Here's the article that has so upset the pro-Trump tweeters and accompanying bots, ICYMI yesterday

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1463870814663622659

Three months into their Watergate reporting in 1972, Woodward & Bernstein slipped up. They reported that Nixon campaign treasurer Hugh Sloan *had told a grand jury* that top Nixon aide HR Haldeman had approval over the secret fund that paid the burglars. This was not true. 1/x

Or rather, it was not exactly true. There was a secret fund. HR Haldeman did have approval rights. But Sloan had not (yet) testified to that effect to the grand jury - he had just privately confirmed the news to the two reporters. So ... an error. 2/x

For the Nixon White House - and for its still-numerous supporters - this error arrived as a God-send.

As with Trump defenders and the Steele dossier, they tried to leverage the reporting error of October 1972 to discredit *everything* that had been published since June. 3/x

"Nixon’s men used the error to disparage all of the newspaper’s Watergate reporting. ... [Press secretary Ron] Ziegler accused The Post of engaging in 'shoddy and shabby' journalism and called the article a 'blatant effort at character assassination.'" washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-h… 4/x

There are multiple lessons to draw from that incident.

One of course is the importance of reporters getting every detail right when following a big story. The error of October 26, 1972, might have cost Woodward and Bernstein their beat, if not their jobs. 5/x

But the second lesson of the October 1972 error is that catching a reporter in a mistake is not the same thing as debunking the larger story the reporter is revealing.

6/x

Along the trail of Trump-Russia, individual reporters made individual mistakes - conceded.

Also true: the modern media landscape is more escape-inviting than that of 1972. We have more news sources, edited less carefully, moving faster, amplified by cable & social media 7/x

Even our most careful sources are probably more vulnerable to error than such sources used to be - and of course the sources that achieve the biggest and most lucrative audiences are not careful at all, in fact are gleefully anti-careful. 8/x

But in the 2010s as in the 1970s, there's a big difference between the correction of errors for the sake of accuracy - and the deployment of errors as a strategic resource to protect the powerful from accountability for wrongdoing.

9/x

A lot of so-called media criticism in the Trump era served - not to raise standards of accuracy - but to aid Trump's many coverups of his many corrupt and abusive acts. 10/x

But as with the reality of Watergate despite the error of October 26, 1972, so with the reality of Trump-Russia despite the Steele dossier: if the story is true, it's the story that matters, and not the (inevitable) flaws and defects of the storytellers. 11/x

And if you've followed this too-long thread this far - here's one more time the link to the confirmed record of the true story of Trump-Russia. END theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

... FOUR months ...