Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny
number of “Russia-linked” social media ads, but the US mainstream media is
determined to keep a straight face
By Robert Parry
October 12, 2017
A key
distinction between propaganda and journalism is that manipulative propaganda
relies on exaggeration and deceit while honest journalism provides context and
perspective. But what happens when the major news outlets of the world’s
superpower become simply conveyor belts for warmongering propaganda?
That
is a question that the American people now face as The New York Times, The
Washington Post, CNN and virtually the entire mainstream media hype
ridiculously minor allegations about Russia’s “meddling” in American politics
into front-page hysteria.
For
instance, on Tuesday, the major news outlets were filled with the latest lurid
chapter of Russia-gate, how Google, the Internet’s dominant search engine, had
detected suspected “Russia-linked” accounts that bought several thousand
dollars worth of ads.
The
Washington Post ran this item as front-page news entitled “Google finds links
to Russian disinformation in its services,” with the excited lede paragraph
declaring: “Russian operatives bought ads across several of Google’s services
without the company’s knowledge, the latest evidence that their campaign to
influence U.S. voters was as sprawling as it was sophisticated in deploying the
technology industry’s most powerful tools.”
Wow!
That sounds serious. However, if you read deeply enough into the story, you
discover that the facts are a wee bit less dramatic. The Post tells us:
“Google’s
internal investigation found $4,700 of search ads and display ads that the
company believes are Russian-connected, and found $53,000 of ads with political
content that were purchased from Russian Internet providers, building addresses
or with Russian currency, people familiar with the investigation said. …
“One
Russian-linked account spent $7,000 on ads to promote a documentary called
‘You’ve Been Trumped,’ a film about Donald Trump’s efforts to build a golf
course in Scotland along an environmentally sensitive coastline, these people
said. Another spent $30,000 on ads questioning whether President Obama needed
to resign. Another bought ads to promote political merchandise for Obama.”
A journalist – rather than a
propagandist – would immediately follow these figures with some context, i.e.,
that Google’s net digital ad sales
revenue is about $70 billion annually. In other words, these
tiny ad buys – with some alleged connection to Russia, a nation of 144 million
people and not all Vladimir Putin’s “operatives” – are infinitesimal when put
into any rational perspective.
A Dangerous Hysteria
But
rationality is not what the Post and other U.S. mainstream news outlets are
engaged in here. They are acting as propagandists determined to whip up a
dangerous hysteria about being at “war” with nuclear-armed Russia and to
delegitimize Trump’s election last year.
It
doesn’t seem to matter that the facts don’t fit the desired narrative. First of
all, none of this content, detected by Google, is “disinformation” as the Post
claims, unless you consider a critical documentary about Trump’s Scottish golf
course to be “disinformation,” or for that matter criticism and/or support for
President Obama.
And,
by the way, how does any of this material reveal a Russian plot to put Trump in
the White House and to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat, which was the original
Russia-gate narrative? Now, we’re being told that any Internet ads bought by
Russians or maybe even by Americans living in Russia are part of some nefarious
Kremlin plot even if the content is an anti-Trump documentary or some ads for
or against President Obama, but nothing attacking Hillary Clinton.
This
surely does not seem like evidence of a “sophisticated” campaign to influence
U.S. politics, as the Post tells us; it is either an indication of a totally
incoherent campaign or no campaign at all, just some random ads taken out by
people in Russia possibly to increase clicks on a Web site or to sell some
merchandise or to express their own opinions.
And,
if you think that this latest Post story is an anomaly – that maybe some editor
was having a bad day and just forgot to include the requisite perspective and
balance – you’d be wrong.
The
same journalistic failures have appeared in similar articles about Facebook and
Twitter, which like Google didn’t detect any Russian operation until put
under intense pressure by influential members of Congress and then “found” a
tiny number of “Russia-linked” accounts.
At Facebook, after two
searches found nothing – and after a personal visit from Sen. Mark Warner,
D-Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a key
legislator on the high-tech industry – the social media company turned up
$100,000 in “Russia-linked” ads spread out over three years (compared to its
annual revenue of $27 billion). Facebook also reported that only 44 percent of
the ads appeared before the 2016 election.
Facing
similar pressures from key members of Congress, Twitter identified 201
“Russia-linked” accounts (out of Twitter’s 328 million monthly users).
Tiny Pebbles
However,
rather than include the comparative numbers which would show how nutty
Russia-gate has become, the U.S. mainstream media systematically avoids any
reference to how tiny the “Russia-linked” pebbles are when compared to the size
of the very large lake into which they were allegedly tossed.
The mainstream Russia-gate
narrative also keeps running up against other inconveniently contrary facts
that then have to be explained away by the “responsible media.” For instance,
The New York Times discovered that one
of the “Russia-linked” Facebook groups was devoted to photos of “adorable
puppies.” That left the “newspaper of record” musing about how nefarious the
Russians must be to cloak their sinister operations behind puppies. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery of the Russia-gate
Puppies.”]
The alternative explanation,
of course, is unthinkable at least within the confines of “acceptable thought”;
the alternative being that there might be no sinister Kremlin campaign to
poison American politics or to install Trump in the White
House, that what we are witnessing is a mainstream stampede similar to what
preceded the Iraq War in 2003.
In
the run-up to that disastrous invasion, every tidbit of suspicion about Saddam
Hussein hiding WMD was trumpeted loudly across the front pages of The New York
Times, The Washington Post and other major U.S. news outlets. The handful of
dissenters who questioned the groupthink were ignored or dismissed as “Saddam
apologists”; most were essentially banned from the public square.
Another
similarity is that in both cases the U.S. government was injecting large sums
of money that helped finance the pro-war propaganda. In the Iraq case, Congress
funded the Iraqi National Congress, which helped generate false WMD claims that
were then accepted credulously by the U.S. mainstream media.
In the Russia-gate case,
Congress has authorized tens of millions of dollars to combat alleged Russian
“propaganda and disinformation,” a sum that is creating a feeding frenzy among
“scholars” and other “experts” to produce reports that support the anti-Russia
narrative. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Slimy Business of Russia-gate.”]
Of
course, the big difference between Iraq in 2003 and Russia in 2017 is that as
catastrophic as the Iraq invasion was, it pales against the potential for
thermo-nuclear war that could lie at the end of this latest hysteria.
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
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