October 4, 2017
Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream
media is determined to prove Russia-gate despite the scandal’s cracking
foundation and its inexplicable anomalies, such as why Russia would set up a
Facebook “puppies” page, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry (Updated Oct.
5 with dropping of two Russia-gate claims)
What is perhaps most
unprofessional, unethical and even immoral about the U.S. mainstream media’s
coverage of Russia-gate is how all the stories start with the conclusion –
“Russia bad” – and then make whatever shards of information exist fit the
preordained narrative.
For instance, we’re told that
Facebook executives, who were sent back three times by Democratic lawmakers to
find something to pin on Russia, finally detected $100,000 worth of ads spread
out over three years from accounts “suspected of links to Russia” or similar
hazy wording.
These Facebook ads and 201
related Twitter accounts, we’re told, represent the long-missing proof about
Russian “meddling” in the U.S. presidential election after earlier claims faltered
or fell apart under even minimal scrutiny.
For example, not only have
major questions been raised about whether Russian
intelligence operatives were behind the “hacking” of Democratic emails, but
the Senate Intelligence Committee announced on Wednesday that two early
elements of the Russia-gate hysteria — minor changes that were made to the
Republican platform and a brief meeting between Russian Ambassador Sergey
Kislyak and then-Sen. (now Attorney General) Jeff Sessions at Washington’s
Mayflower Hotel — have been dropped as innocent or inconsequential.
But like all good conspiracy
theories, once one allegation is dismissed as meaningless, it is replaced by
another and another.
In the old days, journalists
might have expressed some concern that Facebook “found” the “Russia-linked” ads
only under extraordinary
pressure from powerful politicians, such as Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia,
the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading legislator
on the tech industry. But today’s mainstream reporters took Warner’s side and
made it look like Facebook had been dragging its heels and that there must be
much more out there.
However, it doesn’t really
seem to matter how little evidence there is. Anything will do.
Even the paltry $100,000 is
not put in any perspective (Facebook has annual revenue of $27 billion), nor
the 201 Twitter accounts (compared to Twitter’s 328 million monthly users). Nor
are the hazy allegations of “suspected … links to Russia” subjected to serious
inspection. Although Russia is a nation of 144 million people and many
divergent interests, it’s assumed that everything must be personally ordered by
President Vladimir Putin.
Yet, if you look at some of
the details about these $100,000 in ads, you learn the case is even flimsier
than you might have thought. The sum was spread out over 2015, 2016 and 2017 –
and thus represented a very tiny pebble in a very large lake of Facebook
activity.
But more recently we learned
that only 44 percent of the ads appeared before Americans went to the polls
last November, according
to Facebook; that would mean that 56 percent appeared afterwards.
Facebook added that “roughly
25% of the ads were never shown to anyone. … For 50% of the ads, less than $3
was spent; for 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent.”
So, as minuscule as the
$100,000 in ad buys over three years may have seemed, the tiny pebble turns out
really to be only a fraction of a tiny pebble if the Russians indeed did toss
it into the 2016 campaign.
What About the Puppies?
We further have learned that
most ads weren’t for or against a specific candidate, but rather addressed
supposedly controversial issues that the mainstream media insists were meant to
divide the United States and thus somehow undermine American democracy.
Except, it turns out that one
of the issues was puppies.
As Mike Isaac and Scott Shane
of The New York Times reported
in Tuesday’s editions, “The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last
year tried on quite an array of disguises. … There was even a Facebook group
for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site
with the help of paid ads.”
Now, there are a lot of
controversial issues in America, but I don’t think any of us would put puppies
near the top of the list. Isaac and Shane reported that there were also
supposedly Russia-linked groups advocating gay rights, gun rights and black
civil rights, although precisely how these divergent groups were “linked” to
Russia or the Kremlin was never fully explained. (Facebook declined to offer
details.)
At this point, a professional
journalist might begin to pose some very hard questions to the sources, who
presumably include many partisan Democrats and their political allies hyping
the evil-Russia narrative. It would be time for some lectures to the sources
about the consequences for taking reporters on a wild ride in conspiracy land.
Yet, instead of starting to
question the overall premise of this “scandal,” journalists at The New York
Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. keep making excuses for the nuttiness.
The explanation for the puppy ads was that the nefarious Russians might be
probing to discover Americans who might later be susceptible to propaganda.
“The goal of the dog lovers’
page was more obscure,” Isaac and Shane acknowledged. “But some analysts
suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually
introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page,
now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators
tried such tactics.”
The Joe McCarthy of
Russia-gate
The Times then turned to
Clinton Watts, a former FBI agent and a top promoter of the New McCarthyism
that has swept Official Washington. Watts has testified before Congress that
almost anything that appears on social media these days criticizing a
politician may well be traceable to the Russians.
For instance, last March,
Watts testified in conspiratorial terms before the Senate Intelligence
Committee about “social media accounts discrediting U.S. Speaker of the House
Paul Ryan.” At the time, Ryan was under criticism for his ham-handed handling
of a plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, but Watts saw possible Russian
fingerprints.
Watts also claimed that Sen.
Marco Rubio’s presidential bid “anecdotally suffered” from an online
Russian campaign against him, though many of you may have thought Rubio flamed
out because he was a wet-behind-the-ears candidate who performed robotically in
the debates and received the devastating nickname “Little Marco” from Donald
Trump.
Watts explained that these
nefarious Russian schemes left no discernible earmarks or detectable predictability.
Russians attack “people on both sides of the aisle … solely based on what they
[the Russians] want to achieve in their own landscape, whatever the Russian
foreign policy objectives are,” Watts complained.
Watts’s vague allegations
appear to have been the impetus behind Sen. Warner’s repeated demands that
Facebook find some evidence to support the suspicions. After Facebook came up
empty twice, Warner flew to Silicon Valley to personally confront Facebook
executives who then found what Warner wanted them to find, the $100,000 in
suspected Russia-linked ad buys.
So, it perhaps made sense that
the Times would turn to Watts to explain the rather inexplicable Russian
exploitation of puppies. According to Isaac and Shane, Watts “said Russia had
been entrepreneurial in trying to develop diverse channels of influence. Some,
like the dogs page, may have been created without a specific goal and held in
reserve for future use. ‘They were creating many audiences on social media to
try to influence around,’ said Mr. Watts, who has traced suspected Russian
accounts since 2015.”
In other words, if you start
with the need to prove Russian guilt, there are no alternative explanations
besides Russian guilt. If some fact, like the puppies page, doesn’t seem to fit
the sinister conspiracy theory, you simply pound it into place until it does.
Yes, of course, Russian
intelligence operatives must be so sneaky that they are spending money (but not
much) on Facebook puppy ads so they might sometime in the future slip in a few
other ideological messages. It can’t be that perhaps the ads were not part of
some Russian government intelligence operation.
The Russ-kie Plot
But even if we want to believe
that these ads are a Russ-kie plot and were somehow intended to sow dissension
in the U.S., the totals are insignificant, a subset of a subset of a subset of
$100,000 in ad buys over three years that, as far as anyone can tell, had no
real no impact on the 2016 election – and surely much, much, much less than the
political influence from, say, Israel.
If we apply Facebook’s 44
percent figure, that would suggest the total spending in the two years before
the election was around $44,000 and much of that focused on a diverse set of
issues, not specific candidates. So, if some Russians did spend money to
promote gay rights and to push gun rights, any negligible impact on the 2016
election would more or less have been canceled out between Clinton and Trump.
Yet, over these still unproven
and speculative allegations of Russian “links” to these Facebook ads, the
national Democrats and their mainstream media allies are stoking a dangerous
and expensive New Cold War with nuclear-armed Russia.
I realize that lots of
Democrats were upset about Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat and don’t want
to believe that she could have lost fairly to a buffoon like Donald Trump. So,
they are looking for any excuses rather than looking in the mirror.
The major U.S. news outlets
also have joined the anti-Trump Resistance, rather than upholding the
journalistic principles of objectivity and fairness. The Post even came up with
a new melodramatic slogan for the moment: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
But yellow journalism is not
the way to shed light into darkness; it only blinds Democrats from seeing the
real reasons behind Trump’s appeal to many working-class whites who feel
disaffected from a Democratic Party that seems disinterested in their
suffering.
Yes, I know that some
Democrats are still hoping against hope that they can ride Russia-gate all the
way to Trump’s impeachment and get him ridden out of Washington D.C. on a rail,
but the political risk to Democrats is that they will harden the animosity that
many in the white working class already feel toward the party.
That could do more to
strengthen Trump’s appeal to these voters than to weaken him, while hollowing
out Democratic support among millions of peace voters who may simply declare a
plague on both parties.
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