From the New York Times:
Another was how Mr. Trump and Mr. Spicer conflated BuzzFeed’s reporting of the Russia story with CNN’s (which omitted the uncorroborated details). This let him conveniently lump two very different Russia-Trump reports into the same manila folder, mislabeled “fake news,” and deposit them in the circular file together.
While true, this misses an important aspect of the matter. While Trump and Spicer may have intentionally conflated Buzzfeed's and CNN's reporting as a way of dismissing both, it's a near certainty that many people were going to conflate the two when assessing Trump and the stories. We had just seen similar where many were conflating Russian meddling in the election, including releasing emails hacked from Podesta and the DNC, with Russia hacking the election-possibly down to the vote tallying itself.
Frankly, most journalists did not do a very good job of pushing back against that conflation.
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