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 escalates 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 reign 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
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 group thinks about the Ukraine “invasion” with its group
thinks 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 group thinks 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.”
Reprinted
with permission from Consortiumnews.com.
Investigative
reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His latest book is America’s Stolen Narrative.
Copyright ©
2017 Consortiumnews.com
Previous
article by Robert Parry: A Sour Holiday Season for Neocons