Last October, Rolling Stone a story entitled, “FBI Raids Star ABC News Producer’s Home,” with this lede:

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.” 

The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.”

The report describes the quick raid and says multiple sources believed it to be an FBI raid focused on James Gordon Meek. The article says, “Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus.”

But according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, Rolling Stone reporter Tatiana Siegel had originally included an important detail about the reason for the raid. “Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until [February 2023]. Why did Rolling Stone suggest Meek was targeted for his coverage of national security, rather than something unrelated to his journalism?”

According to Folkenflik, Noah Shachtman, Rolling Stone‘s editor-in-chief, covered up the pornography angle without Siegel’s collaboration. Siegel moved to another magazine weeks later.