How the
Press Serves the Deep State
Mainstream U.S. media is proud to be the Deep
State’s tip of the spear pinning President Trump
to the wall over unproven allegations about
Russia and his calls for detente, a rare point
where he makes sense.
By Daniel Lazare
March 02, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
New"
-The New York Times has made it official. In a
Sunday front-page article entitled “Trump Ruled
the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different
Story,” the paper gloats that Donald Trump has
proved powerless to stop a flood of leaks
threatening to capsize his administration.
As
reporters Glenn Thrush and Michael M. Grynbaum
put it:
“This New York-iest of politicians, now an
idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president,
has stumbled into the most conventional of
Washington traps: believing he can master an
entrenched political press corps with far deeper
connections to the permanent government of
federal law enforcement and executive department
officials than he has.”
Thrush
and Grynbaum add a few paragraphs later that
Trump “is being force-fed lessons all presidents
eventually learn – that the iron triangle of the
Washington press corps, West Wing staff and
federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to
bully.”
Iron
triangle? Permanent government? In its tale of
how Trump went from being a favorite of the New
York Post and Daily News to fodder for the
big-time Washington news media, the Times seems
to be going out of its way to confirm dark
paranoid fears of a “deep state” lurking behind
the scenes and dictating what political leaders
can and cannot do. “Too powerful to bully” by a
“write-your-own-rules president” is another way
of saying that the permanent government wants to
do things its way and will not put up with a
president telling it to take a different
approach.
Entrenched interests are nothing new, of
course. But a major news outlet bragging about
collaborating with such elements in order to
cripple a legally established government is. The
Times was beside itself with outrage when top
White House adviser Steve Bannon described the
media as “the
opposition party.” But
one can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is
about since an alliance aimed at hamstringing a
presidency is nothing if not oppositional.
If so,
a few things are worth keeping in mind. One is
that Trump was elected, even if only by an
Eighteenth-Century relic known as the Electoral
College, whereas the deep state, permanent
government, or whatever else you want to call it
was not. Where Trump gave speeches, kissed
babies, and otherwise sought out the vote, the
deep state did nothing. To the degree this
country is still a democracy, that must count
for something. So if the conflict between
president and the deep state ever comes down to
a question of legitimacy, there is no doubt who
will come out ahead: The Donald.
A
second thing worth keeping in mind is that if
ever there was a case of the unspeakable versus
the inedible (to quote Oscar Wilde), the contest
between a billionaire president and
billionaire-owned press is it.
Both
sides are more or less correct in what they say
about the other. Trump really is a strongman at
war with basic democratic norms just as
innumerable Times op-ed articles say he
is. And giant press organization like the
Times and the Washington Post are
every bit as biased and one-sided as Trump
maintains – and no less willfully gullible, one
might add, than in 2002 or 2003 when they
happily swallowed every lie put out by the
George W. Bush administration regarding Iraqi
WMDs or Saddam Hussein’s support for Al Qaeda.
Riveting
TV
Trump’s
Feb. 16 press conference
– surely the most riveting TV since Jerry
Springer was in his prime – is a case in
point. The President bobbed, weaved, and hurled
abuse like a Catskills insult comic. He threw
out pseudo-facts, describing his victory, for
instance, as “the biggest Electoral College win
since Ronald Reagan” when in fact George H. W.
Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all got more
votes. But commentators who panned the display
as a “freak
show” or
simply “batshit
crazy”
didn’t get it. It wasn’t Trump who bombed that
afternoon, but the press.
Why? Because reporters behaved with all the
intelligence of a pack of Jack Russell terriers
barking at a cat up a tree. Basically, they’ve
been seized by the idée fixe that
Russia is a predator state that hacks elections,
threatens U.S. national security, and has now
accomplished the neat trick of planting a
Kremlin puppet in the Oval Office. It doesn’t
matter that evidence is lacking or that the
thesis defies common sense. It’s what they
believe, what their editors believe, and what
the deep state believes too (or at least
pretends to). So the purpose of the Feb. 16
press conference was to pin Trump down as to
whether he also believes the Russia-did-it
thesis and pillory him for deviating from the
party line.
More
than half the questions that reporters threw out
were thus about Russia, about Mike Flynn, the
ex-national security adviser who got
into trouble for talking to the Russian
ambassador before the new administration
formally took office, or about reputed
contacts between the Trump campaign staff and
Moscow. One reporter thus demanded to know if
anyone from Trump’s campaign staff had ever
spoken with the Russian government or Russian
intelligence. Another asked if Trump had
requested FBI telephone intercepts before
determining that Flynn had not broken the law.
“I just
want to get you to clarify this very important
point,” said a third. “Can you say definitively
that nobody on your campaign had any contacts
with the Russians during the campaign?” A fourth
wanted to get the President’s reaction to such
“provocations” as a Russian communications
vessel floating 30 miles off the coast of
Connecticut (in international waters). “Is Putin
testing you, do you believe, sir?” the reporter
asked as if he had just uncovered a Russian
agent in the Lincoln Bedroom. “…But do they
damage the relationship? Do they undermine this
country’s ability to work with Russia?”
When
yet another journalist asked yet again “whether
you are aware that anyone who advised your
campaign had contacts with Russia during the
course of the election,” Trump cried out in
frustration: “How many times do I have to answer
this question?” It was the most intelligent
query of the day.
The
press played straight into Trump’s hands, all
but providing him with his best lines. “Well, I
guess one of the reasons I’m here today is to
tell you the whole Russian thing, that’s a
ruse,” he responded at one point. “That’s a
ruse. And by the way, it would be great if we
could get along with Russia, just so you
understand that. Now tomorrow, you’ll say,
‘Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia,
this is terrible.’ It’s not terrible. It’s
good.”
The
prose may not be very polished, but the
sentiments are unassailable. Ditto Trump’s
statement a few minutes later that “false
reporting by the media, by you people, the
false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much
harder to make a deal with Russia. … And that’s
a shame because if we could get along with
Russia – and by the way, China and Japan and
everyone – if we could get along, it would be a
positive thing, not a negative thing.”
If the
Washington Post and the Times do not agree that
bogus assertions about unauthorized contacts
with Russia are not poisoning
the atmosphere, they should explain very
clearly why not. They should also explain what
they hope to accomplish with a showdown with
Russia and why it will not be a step toward
World War III.
But
they won’t, of course. The media (with
encouragement from parts of the U.S. government)
are working themselves into a fit of outrage
against Vladimir Putin just as, in past
years, they did against Daniel Ortega, Manuel
Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic,
Saddam Hussein (again), Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar
al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych. In each
instance, the outcome has been war, and so far
the present episode shows all signs of heading
in the same direction as well.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
Reporters may be clueless, but working-class
Americans aren’t. They don’t want a war because
they’re the ones who would have to fight it. So
they’re not unsympathetic to Trump and all the
more inclined to give the yapping media short
shrift.
This is
a classic pattern in which strongmen advance on
the basis of a liberal opposition that proves to
be weak and feckless. Today’s liberal media are
obliging Trump by behaving in a way that is
even sillier than usual and well ahead of
schedule to boot.
A Fragile
Meme
The anti-Russia meme, meanwhile, rests on the
thinnest of foundations. The argument that
Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee
and thereby tipped the election to Trump is
based on a single
report
by CrowdStrike, the California-based
cyber-security firm hired by the DNC to look
into the mass email leak. The document is
festooned with head-spinning techno-jargon.
It says
of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, the hackers who
allegedly penetrated the DNC in behalf of
Russian intelligence: “Their tradecraft is
superb, operational security second to none, and
the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’
techniques enables them to easily bypass many
security solutions they encounter. In
particular, we identified advanced methods
consistent with nation-state level capabilities
including deliberate targeting and ‘access
management’ tradecraft – both groups were
constantly going back into the environment to
change out their implants, modify persistent
methods, move to new Command & Control channels,
and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of
being detected. Both adversaries engage in
extensive political and economic espionage for
the benefit of the government of the Russian
Federation and are believed to be closely linked
to the Russian government’s powerful and highly
capable intelligence services.”
Impressive? Not to independent tech experts who
have already begun taking potshots. Sam Biddle,
The Intercept’s extremely smart tech writer,
notes that CrowdStrike claims to have proved
that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are Russian
because they left behind Cyrillic comments in
their “metadata” along with the name “Felix
Edmundovich,” also in Cyrillic, an obvious
reference to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky,
founder of the Cheka, as the Soviet political
police were originally known.
But, Biddle observes, there’s
an obvious contradiction:
“Would a group whose ‘tradecraft is superb’ with
‘operational security second to none’ really
leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief
imprinted on a document it sent to American
journalists? Would these groups really be dumb
enough to leave Cyrillic comments on these
documents? … It’s very hard to buy the argument
that the Democrats were hacked by one of the
most sophisticated, diabolical foreign
intelligence services in history, and that we
know this because they screwed up over and over
again.”
Indeed, John McAfee, founder of McAfee
Associates and developer of the first commercial
anti-virus software, casts doubt on the entire
enterprise, wondering whether it is possible to
identify a hacker at all. “If I were the
Chinese,” he told TV interviewer Larry King in
late December, “and I wanted to make it look
like the Russians did it, I would use Russian
language within the code, I would use Russian
techniques of breaking into organizations. … If
it looks like the Russians did it, then I can
guarantee you: it was not the Russians.” (Quote
starts at 4:30.)
This
may be too sweeping. Nonetheless, if the press
really wanted to get to the bottom of what the
Russians are doing, they would not begin with
the question of what Trump knew and when he knew
it. They would begin, rather, with the question
of what we know and how we can
be sure. It’s the question that the press should
have asked during the run-up to the 2003
invasion of Iraq, but failed to. But it’s the
question that reporters should be asking now
before the conflict with Russia spins out of
control, with consequences that are potentially
even more horrendous.
It’s
not easy making Donald Trump seem like a
peacenik, but that’s what the billionaire’s
press has done.
Daniel Lazare is the author of
several books including The
Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt
Brace).
