MSM,
Still Living in Propaganda-ville
The stakes in U.S.-Russia relations could not be
higher – possible nuclear conflagration and the
end of civilization – but the U.S. mainstream
media is still slouching around in “propaganda-ville,”
says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
July 08,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- As much as the U.S. mainstream media wants
people to believe that it is the Guardian of
Truth, it is actually lost in a wilderness of
propaganda and falsehoods, a dangerous land of
delusion that is putting the future of humankind
at risk as tension escalate with nuclear-armed
Russia.
This
media problem has grown over recent decades as
lucrative careerism has replaced responsible
professionalism. Pack journalism has always been
a threat to quality reporting but now it has
evolved into a self-sustaining media lifestyle
in which the old motto, “there’s safety in
numbers,” is borne out by the fact that being
horrendously wrong, such as on Iraq’s WMD, leads
to almost no accountability because so many
important colleagues were wrong as well.
Similarly, there has been no accountability
after many mainstream journalists and
commentators falsely stated as flat-fact that
“all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” concurred
that Russia did “meddle” in last November’s U.S.
election.
For
months, this claim has been the go-to put-down
whenever anyone questions the groupthink of
Russian venality perverting American democracy.
Even the esteemed “Politifact” deemed the
assertion “true.” But it was never true.
It was at best a needled distortion of a claim
by President Obama’s Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper when he issued
a statement
last Oct. 7 alleging Russian meddling. Because
Clapper was the chief of the U.S. Intelligence
Community, his opinion morphed into a claim that
it represented the consensus of all 17
intelligence agencies, a dishonest twist that
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton began touting.
However, for people who understand how the U.S.
Intelligence Community works, the claim of a
17-agencies consensus has a specific meaning,
some form of a National Intelligence Estimate
(or NIE) that seeks out judgments and dissents
from the various agencies.
But
there was no NIE regarding alleged Russian
meddling and there apparently wasn’t even a
formal assessment from a subset of the agencies
at the time of Clapper’s statement. President
Obama did not order a publishable assessment
until December – after the election – and it was
not completed until Jan. 6, when a report from
Clapper’s office presented the opinions of
analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency,
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National
Security Agency – three agencies (or four if you
count the DNI’s office), not 17.
Lacking
Hard Evidence
The report also contained
no hard evidence
of a Russian “hack” and amounted to a one-sided
circumstantial case at best. However, by then,
the U.S. mainstream media had embraced the
“all-17-intelligence-agencies” refrain and
anyone who disagreed, including President Trump,
was treated as delusional. The argument went:
“How can anyone question what all 17
intelligence agencies have confirmed as true?”
It wasn’t until May 8 when then-former DNI
Clapper belatedly
set the record straight
in sworn congressional testimony in which he
explained that there were only three
“contributing agencies” from which analysts were
“hand-picked.”
The
reference to “hand-picked” analysts pricked the
ears of some former U.S. intelligence analysts
who had suffered through earlier periods of
“politicized” intelligence when malleable
analysts were chosen to deliver what their
political bosses wanted to hear.
On May
23, also in congressional testimony, former CIA
Director John Brennan confirmed Clapper’s
description, saying only four of the 17 U.S.
intelligence agencies took part in the
assessment.
Brennan
said the Jan. 6 report “followed the general
model of how you want to do something like this
with some notable exceptions. It only involved
the FBI, NSA and CIA as well as the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence. It wasn’t
a full inter-agency community assessment that
was coordinated among the 17 agencies.”
After
this testimony, some of the major news
organizations, which had been waving around the
“17-intelligence-agencies” meme, subtly changed
their phrasing to either depict Russian
“meddling” as an established fact no longer
requiring attribution or referred to the
“unanimous judgment” of the Intelligence
Community without citing a specific number.
This
“unanimous judgment” formulation was deceptive,
too, because it suggested that all 17 agencies
were in accord albeit without exactly saying
that. For a regular reader of The New York Times
or a frequent viewer of CNN, the distinction
would almost assuredly not be detected.
For
more than a month after the Clapper-Brennan
testimonies, there was no formal correction.
A Belated
Correction
Finally, on June 25, the Times’
hand was forced
when White House correspondent Maggie Haberman
reverted to the old formulation, mocking Trump
for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic
fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence
agencies that he now oversees: Russia
orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get
him elected.”
When
this falsehood was called to the Times’
attention, it had little choice but to append a
correction to the article, noting that the
intelligence “assessment was made by four
intelligence agencies — the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the National Security Agency.
The assessment was not approved by all 17
organizations in the American intelligence
community.”
The
Associated Press ran a similar “clarification”
applied to some of its fallacious reporting
repeating the “17-intelligence-agencies” meme.
So, you
might have thought that the mainstream media was
finally adjusting its reporting to conform to
reality. But that would mean that one of the
pillars of the Russia-gate “scandal” had
crumbled, the certainty that Russia and Vladimir
Putin did “meddle” in the election.
The
story would have to go back to square one and
the major news organizations would have to begin
reporting on whether or not there ever was solid
evidence to support what had become a
“certainty” – and there appeared to be no
stomach for such soul-searching. Since pretty
much all the important media figures had made
the same error, it would be much easier to
simply move on as if nothing had changed.
That
would mean that skepticism would still be
unwelcome and curious leads would not be
followed. For instance, there was a head-turning
reference in an otherwise typical Washington
Post take-out on June 25 accusing Russia of
committing “the crime of the century.”
A
reference, stuck deep inside the five-page opus,
said, “Some of the most critical technical
intelligence on Russia came from another
country, officials said. Because of the source
of the material, the NSA was reluctant to view
it with high confidence.”
Though
the Post did not identify the country, this
reference suggests that more than one key
element of the case for Russian culpability was
based not on direct investigations by the U.S.
intelligence agencies, but on the work of
external organizations.
Earlier, the Democratic National Committee
denied the FBI access to its supposedly hacked
computers, forcing the investigators to rely on
a DNC contractor called CrowdStrike, which has a
checkered record of getting this sort of
analytics right and whose chief technology
officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, is an anti-Putin
Russian émigré with ties to the anti-Russian
think tank, Atlantic Council.
Relying on
Outsiders
You
might be wondering why something as important as
this “crime of the century,” which has pushed
the world closer to nuclear annihilation, is
dependent on dubious entities outside the U.S.
government with possible conflicts of interest.
If the
U.S. government really took this issue
seriously, which it should, why didn’t the FBI
seize the DNC’s computers and insist that
impartial government experts lead the
investigation? And why – given the extraordinary
expertise of the NSA in computer hacking – is
“some of the most critical technical
intelligence on Russia [coming] from another
country,” one that doesn’t inspire the NSA’s
confidence?
But
such pesky questions are not likely to be asked
or answered by a mainstream U.S. media that
displays deep-seated bias toward both Putin and
Trump.
Mostly,
major news outlets continue to brush aside the
clarifications and return to various
formulations that continue to embrace the
“17-intelligence-agencies” canard, albeit in
slightly different forms, such as references to
the collective Intelligence Community without
the specific number. Anyone who questions this
established conventional wisdom is still crazy
and out of step.
For instance, James Holmes of Esquire
was stunned on
Thursday when Trump at a news conference in
Poland reminded the traveling press corps about
the inaccurate reporting regarding the 17
intelligence agencies and said he still wasn’t
entirely sure about Russia’s guilt.
“In
public, he’s still casting doubt on the
intelligence community’s finding that Russia
interfered in the 2016 election nearly nine
months after the fact,” Holmes sputtered before
describing Trump’s comment as a “rant.”
So, if
you thought that a chastened mainstream media
might stop in the wake of the
“17-intelligence-agencies” falsehood and rethink
the whole Russia-gate business, you would have
been sadly mistaken.
But the
problem is not just the question of whether
Russia hacked into Democratic emails and slipped
them to WikiLeaks for publication (something
that both Russia and WikiLeaks deny). Perhaps
the larger danger is how the major U.S. news
outlets have adopted a consistently
propagandistic approach toward everything
relating to Russia.
Hating
Putin
This
pattern traces back to the earliest days of
Vladimir Putin’s presidency in 2000 when he
began to rein in the U.S.-prescribed “shock
therapy,” which had sold off Russia’s assets to
well-connected insiders, making billions of
dollars for the West-favored “oligarchs,” even
as the process threw millions of average Russian
into poverty.
But the U.S. mainstream media’s contempt for
Putin
reached new heights
after he helped President Obama head off
neoconservative (and liberal interventionist)
demands for a full-scale U.S. military assault
on Syria in August 2013 and helped bring Iran
into a restrictive nuclear agreement when the
neocons wanted to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.
The neocons delivered their payback to Putin in
early 2014 by supporting a violent coup in
Ukraine, overthrowing elected President Viktor
Yanukovych and installing a fiercely
anti-Russian regime. The U.S. operation was
spearheaded by
neocon National Endowment for Democracy
President Carl Gershman and neocon Assistant
Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria
Nuland, with enthusiastic support from neocon
Sen. John McCain.
Nuland
was heard in an intercepted pre-coup phone call
with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing
who should become the new leaders and pondering
how to “glue” or “midwife this thing.”
Despite
the clear evidence of U.S. interference in
Ukrainian politics, the U.S. government and the
mainstream media embraced the coup and accused
Putin of “aggression” when ethnic Russians in
eastern Ukraine, called the Donbas, resisted the
coup regime.
When
ethnic Russians and other citizens in Crimea
voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to reject
the coup regime and rejoin Russia – a move
protected by some of the 20,000 Russian troops
inside Crimea as part of a basing agreement –
that became a Russian “invasion.” But it was the
most peculiar “invasion,” since there were no
images of tanks crashing across borders or
amphibious landing craft on Crimean beaches,
because no such “invasion” had occurred.
However, in virtually every instance, the U.S.
mainstream media insisted on the most extreme
anti-Russian propaganda line and accused people
who questioned this Official Narrative of
disseminating Russian “propaganda”
– or being a “Moscow stooge” or acting as a
“useful fool.” There was no tolerance for
skepticism about whatever the State Department
or the Washington think tanks were saying.
Trump
Meets Putin
So, as
Trump prepares for his first meeting with Putin
at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, the U.S.
mainstream media has been in a frenzy, linking
up its groupthinks about the Ukraine “invasion”
with its groupthinks about Russia “hacking” the
election.
In a July 3
editorial, The
Washington Post declared, “Mr. Trump simply
cannot fail to admonish Mr. Putin for Russia’s
attempts to meddle in the 2016 presidential
election. He must make clear the United States
will not tolerate it, period. Naturally, this is
a difficult issue for Mr. Trump, who reaped the
benefit of Russia’s intervention and now faces a
special counsel’s investigation, but
nonetheless, in his first session with Mr.
Putin, the president must not hesitate to be
blunt. …
“On
Ukraine, Mr. Trump must also display
determination. Russia fomented an armed uprising
and seized Crimea in violation of international
norms, and it continues to instigate violence in
the Donbas. Mr. Trump ought to make it
unmistakably clear to Mr.Putin that the United
States will not retreat from the sanctions
imposed over Ukraine until the conditions of
peace agreements are met.”
Along the same lines, even while suggesting the
value of some collaboration with Russia toward
ending the war in Syria, Post columnist David
Ignatius wrote in a July 5
column,
“Russian-American cooperation on Syria faces a
huge obstacle right now. It would legitimize a
Russian regime that invaded Ukraine and meddled
in U.S. and European elections, in addition to
its intervention in Syria.”
Note
the smug certainty of Ignatius and the Post
editors. There is no doubt that Russia “invaded”
Ukraine; “seized” Crimea; “meddled” in U.S. and
European elections. Yet all these groupthinks
should be subjected to skepticism, not simply
treated as undeniable truths.
But
seeing only one side to a story is where the
U.S. mainstream media is at this point in
history. Yes, it is possible that Russia was
responsible for the Democratic hacks and did
funnel the material to WikiLeaks, but evidence
has so far been lacking. And, instead of
presenting both sides fairly, the major media
acts as if only one side deserves any respect
and dissenting views must be ridiculed and
condemned.
In this
perverted process, collectively approved
versions of complex situations congeal into
conventional wisdom, which simply cannot be
significantly reconsidered regardless of future
revelations.
As
offensive as this rejection of true
truth-seeking may be, it also represents an
extraordinary danger when mixed with the
existential risk of nuclear conflagration.
With
the stakes this high, the demand for hard
evidence – and the avoidance of soft-minded
groupthink – should go without question.
Journalists and commentators should hold
themselves to professional precision, not slide
into sloppy careerism, lost in “propaganda-ville.”
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many
of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his
latest book,
America’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an
e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
This article was first published by
Consortium News
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The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.