I’m Not Making Unsupported Claims; You Are!

In the Letters to the Editor section of the Jan. 31 Jewish Journal issue is a letter titled, “Don’t Print Speculation.” The letter’s author complains about a column by Dan Schnur which, he says, contains an “unfounded supposition” about Donald Trump. He then goes on to broadly accuse “Never Trumpers,” saying, “Without any facts to support their position, they rely on conjecture, speculation and innuendo.”

I completely agree that unfounded accusations about people are far too common, especially in social media, so I wanted to see for myself what this letter was referring to. Assuming this author is writing about Schnur’s Jan. 16 column, the letter writer seems to have missed the second paragraph, in which Schnur lays out a series of facts as evidence in regard to Trump’s connections with Russia.

One may or may not agree on what to make of those facts, but at least they are there. On top of that, I read the message of the column as warning us against jumping to conclusions and urging us to wait until Special Counsel Robert Mueller publishes his findings of Trump and Russia.

So, right off the bat, this appears to be a case of the letter writer falsely accusing Dan Schnur of coming to an “unfounded supposition.” It gets worse from there.

He accuses BuzzFeed of publishing an “unverified dossier” even though BuzzFeed at the time provided appropriate context for it, and much of the dossier has since been verified. He also takes BuzzFeed to task for the story in which it claimed Michael Cohen was instructed by Donald Trump to lie to Congress.

In other words, the letter writer does exactly what he accuses “Never Trumpers” of doing. He accuses them of relying on “conjecture, speculation and innuendo” without any facts, and then as an example, he uses two examples from a single media outlet, with the first example being that apparently he just didn’t like the facts the outlet published (the existence of the dossier is a fact and what it contains is a fact, whether or not all of those contents have yet been verified), and the second example being a case in which facts as BuzzFeed understood them were supplied, although the accuracy of some of those facts are currently in dispute. It’s true that some may believe the letter writer’s complaints may reflect poorly on BuzzFeed, but they are not examples of speculation without facts, and they hardly support his broad claim about “Never Trumpers.”

I do not place the whole blame for this on the letter writer. Although we can’t control what is being said on social media, responsible media outlets like the Jewish Journal can, and I believe should, refrain from contributing to the degradation of intelligent public discourse by printing columns, blogs, letters to the editor, or anything else which contain patently false or obviously misleading information, nor should it print ad hominem attacks or broad claims that are unsupported by facts. The Jewish Journal cannot solve the problem, but it can refrain from contributing to it.