Last Friday, most major media outlets touted a major story about
Russian attempts to hack into U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims
made by the Department of Homeland Security. “Russians attempted to hack
elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year’s presidential
election, officials said Friday,” began the USA Today story, similar to how most
other outlets presented this extraordinary claim.
This official story was explosive for
obvious reasons, and predictably triggered instant decrees – that of course
went viral – declaring that the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2016 U.S.
presidential election is now in doubt.
Virginia’s Democratic Congressman Don
Beyer, referring to the 21 targeted states, announced that this shows “Russia
tried to hack their election”:
MSNBC’s Paul Revere for all matters
relating to the Kremlin take-over, Rachel Maddow, was indignant that this
wasn’t told to us earlier and that we still aren’t getting all the details.
“What we have now figured out,” Maddow gravely intoned as she showed the
multi-colored maps she made, is that “Homeland Security knew at least by
June that 21 states had been targeted by Russian hackers during the election. .
.targeting their election infrastructure.”
They were one small step away from
demanding that the election results be nullified, indulging the sentiment
expressed by #Resistance icon Carl Reiner the other day: “Is there anything more
exciting that [sic] the possibility of Trump’s election being
invalidated & Hillary rightfully installed as our President?”
So what was wrong with this story? Just
one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin –
one of the states included in the original report that, for obvious reasons,
caused the most excitement – did not, in fact, have its election systems
targeted by Russian hackers:
The spokesman for Homeland Security
then tried to walk back that reversal, insisting that there was still evidence
that some computer networks had been targeted, but could not say that they had
anything to do with elections or voting. And, as AP noted: “Wisconsin’s chief
elections administrator, Michael Haas, had repeatedly said that Homeland
Security assured the state it had not been targeted.”
Then the story collapsed completely
last night. The Secretary of State for another one of the named states,
California, issued a scathing statement repudiating the claimed report:
Sometimes stories end up debunked.
There’s nothing particularly shocking about that. If this were an isolated
incident, one could chalk it up to basic human error that has no broader
meaning.
But this is no isolated incident. Quite
the contrary: this has happened over and over and over again. Inflammatory
claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based
on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to
collapse under the slightest scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in
evidence.
The examples of such debacles when it
comes to claims about Russia are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. I
wrote about this phenomenon many times and listed many of the examples, the last time in June when 3 CNN journalists
“resigned” over a completely false story linking Trump adviser Anthony
Scaramucci to investigations into a Russian investment fund which the network
was forced to retract:
Remember that time
the Washington Post claimed that Russia had hacked the U.S. electricity grid,
causing politicians to denounce Putin for trying to deny heat to Americans in
winter, only to have to issue multiple retractions because none of that
ever happened? Or the time that the Post had to publish a massive editor’s note after its
reporters made claims about Russian infiltration of the internet and spreading
of “Fake News” based on an anonymous group’s McCarthyite blacklist that counted
sites like the Drudge Report and various left-wing outlets as Kremlin agents?
Or that time when Slate claimed that
Trump had created a secret server with a Russian bank, all based on evidence that
every other media outlet which looked at it were too embarrassed to get near? Or the time the
Guardian was forced to retract its report by Ben Jacobs –
which went viral – that casually asserted that WikiLeaks has a long
relationship with the Kremlin? Or the time that Fortune retracted suggestions that RT had hacked into and
taken over C-SPAN’s network? And then there’s the huge market that was created
– led by leading Democrats – that blindly ingested every conspiratorial, unhinged claim
about Russia churned out by an army of crazed conspiracists such as Louise
Mensch and Claude “TrueFactsStated” Taylor?
And now we have the
Russia-hacked-the-voting-systems-of-21-states to add to this trash heap. Each
time the stories go viral; each time they further shape the narrative; each
time those who spread them say little to nothing when it is debunked.
None of this means that every Russia claim is false, nor does it
disprove the accusation that Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and John
Podesta’s email inboxes (a claim for which, just by the way, still no evidence
has been presented by the U.S. government). Perhaps there were some states that
were targeted, even though the key claims of this story, that attracted the
most attention, have now been repudiated.
But what it does demonstrate is that an
incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails when it comes to claims
about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion as
Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards.
Seeing Putin lurking behind and masterminding every western
problem is now religious dogma – it explains otherwise-confounding
developments, provides certainty to a complex world, and alleviates numerous
factions of responsibility – so media outlets and their journalists are
lavishly rewarded any time they publish accusatory stories about Russia
(especially ones involving the U.S. election), even if they end up being
debunked.
A highly touted story yesterday from the New York
Times – claiming that Russians used Twitter more widely known than before to
manipulate U.S. politics – demonstrates this recklessness. The story is based
on the claims of a new group formed just two months ago by a union of neocons
and Democratic national security officials, led by long-time liars and
propagandists such as Bill Kristol, former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, and
Bush Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff. I reported on the founding of this group, calling
itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, when it was unveiled (this is
not to be confused with the latest new Russia group unveiled last week by Rob Reiner and David Frum
and featuring a different former national security state official (former
DNI James Clapper) – calling itself InvestigateRussia.org – featuring a video
declaring that the U.S. is now “at war with Russia”).
The Kristol/Morell/Chertoff group on
which the Times based its article has a very simple
tactic: they secretly decide which Twitter accounts are “Russia
bots,” meaning accounts that disseminate an “anti-American message” and are
controlled by the Kremlin. They refuse to tell anyone which Twitter accounts they
decided are Kremlin-loyal, nor will they identify their methodology for
creating their lists or determining what constitutes “anti-Americanism.”
They do it all in secret, and you’re
just supposed to trust them: Bill Kristol, Mike Chertoff and their national
security state friends. And the New York Times is apparently fine with this
demand, as evidenced by its uncritical acceptance yesterday of the claims of
this group – a group formed by the nation’s least trustworthy sources.
But no matter. It’s a claim about
nefarious Russian control. So it’s instantly vested with credibility and
authority, published by leading news outlets, and then blindly accepted as fact
in most elite circles. From now on, it will simply be Fact – based on the New
York Times article – that the Kremlin aggressively and effectively weaponized
Twitter to manipulate public opinion and sow divisions during the election,
even though the evidence for this new story is the secret, unverifiable
assertions of a group filled with the most craven neocons and national security
state liars.
That’s how the Russia narrative is
constantly “reported,” and it’s the reason so many of the biggest stories have
embarrassingly collapsed. It’s because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike
the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than
rational faculties.
No questioning of official claims is
allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before
being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. And the penalty for desiring to
see evidence for official claims, or questioning the validity and
persuasiveness of the evidence that is proffered, are accusations that impugn
one’s patriotism and loyalty (simply wanting to see evidence for official
claims about Russia is proof, in many quarters, that one is a Kremlin agent or
at least adores Putin – just as wanting to see evidence in 2002,
or questioning the evidence presented for claims about Saddam, was
viewed as proof that one harbored sympathy for the Iraqi dictator).
Regardless of your views on Russia,
Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. Just
look at how many major, incredibly inflammatory stories, from major media
outlets, have collapsed. Is it not clear that there is something very wrong
with how we are discussing and reporting on relations between these two
nuclear-armed powers?
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