There has been a lot said about Buzzfeed’s release of an unsubstantiated document, concerning a possible sex tape being used as leverage over President Trump by the Kremlin.

The dossier was shared with both the outgoing Obama administration, as well as the incoming Trump administration, this much is truth.

The lingering question remains as to how much of it was actual truth (The Trump camp denies it, in total), and how much was just fabrication by political enemies?

That’s the problem with releasing these kinds of documents without thorough investigation and concrete evidence to back them up. Controversy and speculation cloud any attempts to uncover the truth.

The editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, Ben Smith, is speaking up and defending the release of the dossier earlier this month, saying the public deserved to see it.

Writing in a New York Times op-ed, Smith said:

“Whether reporters from Washington to Budapest succeed in verifying its claims or otherwise does not diminish the compelling public interest in the story — or the presumptive right of the public, and not just a Beltway elite, to see the document,” Smith wrote.

He’s not entirely wrong.

The public should know what may or may not be hanging over the heads of their elected officials, especially if that information may somehow compromise their ability to do the job they were elected to do by the people, or otherwise lead them to act against their constituents’ best interests.

However, before setting the public ablaze with rumors and innuendo, perhaps letting the intelligence community or other investigatory agencies do their jobs first would be the more prudent move?

BuzzFeed said when it published the document that it “includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians.”

Citing the current “media ecosystem,” Smith maintained in the Times op-ed that Americans learned to “read carefully, exercise judgment and view with skepticism” from the 2016 presidential campaign.

Ok. Now I think he’s just punking us.

If anything, 2016 proved that the American public was all about grabbing memes and parody sites and running with whatever they said as truth, as long as it backed up their particular ideological bent.

Pizzagate, anyone?

Yes. That was an internet hoax, based on a scrap from a leaked Podesta email, that has already put peoples’ lives in danger.

“In a democracy, the justification for shielding the public from something like that must be overwhelming. The instinct to suppress news of this significance is precisely the wrong one for journalism in 2017,” Smith wrote.

It’s not really “suppressing” if you’re simply waiting for some kind of verification.

In fact, while I think the notion of Russia blackmailing a U.S. politician with salacious information is entirely plausible, I still believe we’re not at a time in our history where we can afford for our press to be anything but absolutely ethical and exceedingly careful with the kinds of stories they release to the public.

As for any of that happening…