September 2, 2017
Special Report: The New York
Times is at it again, reporting unproven allegations about Russia as flat fact,
while anyone who questions the Russia-gate groupthink faces ugly attacks,
reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
It is a basic rule from
Journalism 101 that when an allegation is in serious doubt – or hasn’t been
established as fact – you should convey that uncertainty to your reader by
using words like “alleged” or “purportedly.” But The New York Times and pretty
much the entire U.S. news media have abandoned that principle in their avid
pursuit of Russia-gate.
When Russia is the target of
an article, the Times typically casts aside all uncertainty about Russia’s
guilt, a pattern that we’ve seen in the Times in earlier sloppy reporting about
other “enemy” countries, such as Iraq or Syria, as well Russia’s involvement in
Ukraine’s civil war. Again and again, the Times regurgitates highly tendentious
claims by the U.S. government as undeniable truth.
So, despite the lack of
publicly provided evidence that the Russian government did “hack” Democratic
emails and slip them to WikiLeaks to damage Hillary Clinton and help Donald
Trump, the Times continues to treat those allegations as flat fact.
For a while, the Times also
repeated the false claim that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” concurred in
the Russia-did-it conclusion, a lie that was used to intimidate and silence
skeptics of the thinly sourced Russia-gate reports issued by President Obama’s
intelligence chiefs.
Only after two of those chiefs
– Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan
– admitted that the key Jan. 6 report was produced by what Clapper
called “hand-picked” analysts from just three agencies, the Times was
forced to run an
embarrassing correction retracting the “17 agencies” canard.
But the Times then switched
its phrasing to a claim that Russian guilt was a “consensus” of the U.S.
intelligence community, a misleading formulation that still suggests that all
17 agencies were onboard without actually saying so – all the better to fool
the Times readers.
The Times seems to have
forgotten what one of its own journalists observed immediately after reading
the Jan. 6 report. Scott Shane wrote:
“What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly
anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian
government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the
agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
However, if that was the
calculation of Obama’s intelligence chiefs – that proof would not be required –
they got that right, since the Times and pretty much every other major U.S.
news outlet has chosen to trust, not verify, on Russia-gate.
Dropping the Attribution
In story after story, the
Times doesn’t even bother to attribute the claims of Russian guilt. That guilt
is just presented as flat fact even though the Russian government denies it and
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he did not get the emails from Russia or
any other government.
Of course, it is possible the
Russian government is lying and that some cut-outs were used to hide from
Assange the real source of the emails. But the point is that we don’t know the
truth and neither does The New York Times – and likely neither does the U.S.
government (although it talks boldly about its “high confidence” in the
evidence-lite conclusions of those “hand-picked” analysts).
And, the Times continues with
this pattern of asserting as certain what is both in dispute and lacking in
verifiable evidence. In a front-page Russia-gate story
on Saturday, the Times treats Russian guilt as flat fact again. The online
version of the story carried the headline: “Russian Election Hacking Efforts,
Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny.”
The Times’ article opens with
an alarmist lede about voters in heavily Democratic Durham, North Carolina,
encountering problems with computer rolls:
“Susan Greenhalgh, a
troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, knew that the
company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by
Russian hackers months before. ‘It felt like tampering, or some kind of
cyberattack,’ Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.”
The Times reported that Greenhalgh
“knew” this supposed fact because she heard it on “a CNN report.”
If you read deeper into the
story, you learn that “local officials blamed human error and software
malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much
less a Russian role in it.” But the Times clearly doesn’t buy that explanation,
adding:
“After a presidential campaign
scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted
little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the
impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were
targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen
national security and state officials and election technology specialists.”
But was the 2016 campaign
really “scarred by Russian meddling”? For instance, the “fake news” hysteria of
last fall was actually traced to young entrepreneurs who were exploiting the
gullibility of Donald Trump’s supporters to get lots of “clicks” and thus make
more ad revenue. The stories didn’t trace back to the Russian government. (Even
the Times discovered
that reality although it apparently has since been forgotten.)
‘Undermining’ American
Democracy
The Jan.
6 report by those “hand-picked” analysts from CIA, FBI and the National
Security Agency did tack on a seven-page appendix from 2012 that accused
Russia’s RT network of seeking to undermine U.S. democracy. But the complaints
were bizarre if not laughable, including the charge that RT covered the Occupy
Wall Street protests, reported on the dangers of “fracking,” and allowed
third-party presidential candidates to state their views after they were
excluded from the two-party debate between Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat
Barack Obama.
That such silly examples of
“undermining” American democracy were even cited in the Jan. 6 report should
have been an alarm bell to any professional journalist that the report was a
classic case of biased analysis if not outright propaganda. But the report was
issued amid the frenzy over the incoming Trump presidency when Democrats – and
much of the mainstream media – were enlisting in the #Resistance. The Jan. 6
report was viewed as a crucial weapon to take out Trump, so skepticism was
suppressed.
Because of that – and with
Trump continuing to alarm many Americans with his erratic temperament and his
coy encouragement of white nationalism – the flimsy Russian “hacking” case has
firmed up into a not-to-be-questioned groupthink, as the Times story on
Saturday makes clear:
“The assaults on the vast
back-end election apparatus [i.e. voting rolls] … have received far less
attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking
of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs.
Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than
previously disclosed, The New York Times found.”
In other words, even though
there has been no solid proof of this “Russian interference” – either the
“hacking of Democratic emails” or the “spreading of false or damaging
information about Mrs. Clinton” – the Times reports those allegations as flat
fact before extending the suspicions into the supposed “hacking of electoral
systems” despite the lack of supporting evidence and in the face of
counter-explanations from local officials. As far as the Times is concerned,
the problem couldn’t be that some volunteer poll worker screwed up the
software. No, it must be the dirty work of Russia! Russia! Russia!
The Times asserts that
“Russian efforts to compromise American election systems … include combing
through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data,
which have been identified in multiple states.” Again, the Times does not apply
words like “alleged”; it is just flat fact.
Uncertainty Acknowledged
Yet, oddly, the quote used to
back up this key accusation acknowledges how little is actually known. The
Times cites Michael Daniel, the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White
House, as saying:
“We don’t know if any of the
[computer] problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with
computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a
sovereign nation-state. … If you really want to know what happened, you’d have
to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not
find out even then.’”
Which is exactly the point: as
far as we know from the public record, no U.S. government forensics have been
done on the Russian “hacking” allegations, period. Regarding the “hack” of the
Democratic National Committee’s emails, the FBI did not secure the computers
for examination but instead relied on the
checkered reputation of a private outfit called Crowdstrike, which based
much of its conclusion on the fact that Russian lettering and a reference to a
famous Russian spy were inserted into the metadata. Why the supposedly crack
Russian government hackers would be so sloppy has never been explained. It also
could not be excluded that these insertions were done deliberately to
incriminate the Russians.
Without skepticism, the Times
accepts that there is some secret U.S. government information that should
bolster the public’s confidence about Russian guilt, but none of that evidence
is spelled out, other than ironically to say what the Russians weren’t doing.
The Times cited the Jan. 6
report’s determination that “The Russians shied away from measures that might
alter the ‘tallying’ of votes, … a conclusion drawn from American spying and
intercepts of Russian officials’ communications and an analysis by the
Department of Homeland Security, according to the current and former government
officials.”
But this seems to be the one
U.S. government conclusion that the Times doubts, i.e., a finding of Russian
innocence on the question of altering the vote count.
Again accepting as flat fact
all the other U.S. government claims about Russia, the Times writes: “Apart
from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and
other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts
at the state and county level has not been widely studied.”
There’s, of course, another
rule from Journalism 101: that when there is a serious accusation, the accused
is afforded a meaningful chance to dispute the allegation, but the Times
lengthy article ignores that principle, too. The Russian government and
WikiLeaks do not get a shot at knocking down the various allegations and
suspicions.
Deep-seated Bias
The reality is that the Times
has engaged in a long pattern of anti-Russia prejudice going back a number of
years but escalating dramatically since 2013 when prominent neoconservatives
began to target Russia as an obstacle to their agendas of “regime change” in
Syria and “bomb-bomb-bombing” Iran.
By September 2013, the neocons
were targeting Ukraine as what neocon National Endowment for Democracy
president Carl Gershman deemed
the “biggest prize” and an important step toward an even bigger prize,
neutralizing or ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When neocon U.S. officials,
such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain,
encouraged a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych,
the
Times served as a cheerleader for the coup-makers even though the violence
was spearheaded by neo-Nazis and extreme Ukrainian nationalists.
When ethnic Russians in
eastern Ukraine and Crimea resisted the Feb. 22, 2014 coup, the Times
collaborated with the State Department in presenting this rejection of an
unconstitutional transfer of power as a “Russian invasion.”
For instance, on April 21,
2014, the Times led its print editions with an investigative story using photos
provided by the coup regime and the State Department to supposedly show that
fighters inside Ukraine had previously been photographed inside Russia, except
that the two key photographs were both taken inside Ukraine, forcing the Times
to run a
half-hearted retraction two days later.
Here is the tortured
way the Times treated that embarrassing lapse in its journalistic
standards: “A packet of American briefing materials … asserts that the
photograph was taken in Russia. The same men are also shown in photographs
taken in Ukraine. Their appearance in both photographs was presented as
evidence of Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine.
“The packet was later provided
by American officials to The New York Times, which included that description of
the group photograph in an article and caption that was published on Monday.
The dispute over the group photograph cast a cloud over one particularly vivid
and highly publicized piece of evidence.”
In other words, U.S. officials
hand-fed the Times this “scoop” on a Russian “invasion” and the Times swallowed
it whole. But the Times never seems to learn any lessons from its credulous
approach to whatever the U.S. government provides. You might have thought that
the Times’ disgraceful performance in pushing
the Iraq-WMD story in 2002 would have given the newspaper pause, but its
ideological biases apparently win out every time.
Two Birds, One Stone
In the case of the Russian
“hacking” stories, the anti-Russia bias is compounded by an anti-Trump bias, a
two-fer that has overwhelmed all notions of journalistic principles not only at
the Times but at other mainstream news outlets and many liberal/progressive
ones which want desperately to see Trump impeached and view Russia-gate as the
pathway to that outcome.
So, while there was almost no
skepticism about the Jan. 6 report by those “hand-picked” analysts – even
though the report amounts only to a series of “we assess” this and “we assess”
that, i.e,, their opinions, not facts – there has been a bubbling media
campaign to discredit a
July 24 memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The memo, signed by 17 members
of the group including former NSA technical director for world geopolitical and
military analysis William Binney, challenged the technological possibility of
Russian hackers extracting data over the Internet at the speed reflected in one
of the posted documents.
After The Nation published an
article by Patrick Lawrence about the VIPS memo (a story that we re-posted
at Consortiumnews.com), editor Katrina vanden Heuvel came under intense
pressure inside the liberal magazine to somehow repudiate its findings and
restore the Russia-gate groupthink.
Outside pressure also came
from a number of mainstream sources, including Washington Post blogger Eric
Wemple, who interviewed Nation
columnist Katha Pollitt about the inside anger over Lawrence’s story
and its citation by Trump defenders, a development which upset Pollitt: “These
are our friends now? The Washington Times, Breitbart, Seth Rich truthers and
Donald Trump Jr.? Give me a break. It’s very upsetting to me. It’s
embarrassing.”
However, in old-fashioned
journalism, our reporting was intended to inform the American people and indeed
the world as fully and fairly as possible. We had no control over how the information
would play out in the public domain. If our information was seized upon by one
group or another, so be it. It was the truthfulness of the information that was
important, not who cited it.
A Strange Attack
But clearly inside The Nation,
Pollitt and others were upset that the VIPS memo had undercut the Russia-gate
groupthink. So, in response to this pressure, vanden Heuvel solicited an attack
on the VIPS memo by several dissident members of VIPS and she topped Lawrence’s
article with a lengthy editor’s note.
Strangely, this solicited
attack on the VIPS memo cites as its “first” point that the Jan. 6
intelligence report did not explicitly use the word “hack,” but rather “cyber
operation,” adding: “This could mean via the network, the cloud, computers,
remote hacking, or direct data removal.”
That uncertainty about how the
emails were extracted supposedly undercut the VIPS argument that the download
speeds prohibited the possibility of a “hack,” but this pretense that the
phrase “cyber operation” isn’t referring to a “hack” amounts to a disingenuous
word game. After all, senior U.S. intelligence officials, including former FBI
Director James Comey, have stated under oath and in interviews with major news
outlets that they were referring to a “hack.”
These officials also have
cited the Crowdstrike analysis of the DNC “hack” as support for their analysis,
and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has described how he was the victim
of a “spear-phishing” scam that allowed his emails to be hacked.
After all these months of
articles about the Russian “hack,” it seems a bit late to suddenly pretend no
one was referring to a “hack” – only after some seasoned experts concluded that
a “hack” was not feasible. Despite the latest attacks, the authors of the VIPS
memo, including former NSA technology official Binney, stand by their findings.
However, when the cause is to
demonize Russia and/or to unseat Trump, apparently any sleight of hand or
McCarthyistic smear is permissible.
In Post blogger Wemple’s article
about The Nation’s decision to undercut the VIPS memo, he includes some nasty
asides against Russia scholar Stephen Cohen, who happens to be Katrina vanden
Heuvel’s husband.
In a snide tone, Wemple
describes Cohen as providing “The soft-glove treatment of Russian President
Vladimir Putin,” calling it Cohen’s “specialty.”
Wemple also repeats the canard
about “a consensus finding of the U.S. intelligence community” when we have
known for some time that the Jan. 6 report was the work of those “hand-picked”
analysts from three agencies, not a National Intelligence Estimate that would
reflect the consensus view of all 17 agencies and include dissents.
What is playing out here –
both at The New York Times and across the American media landscape – is a
totalitarian-style approach toward any challenge to the groupthink on
Russia-gate.
Even though the Obama
administration’s intelligence chiefs presented no public evidence to support
their “assessments,” anyone who questions their certainty can expect to be
smeared and ridiculed. We must all treat unverified opinions as flat fact.
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