Matt Taibbi
The Iraq war faceplant damaged
the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
Nobody wants to hear this, but
news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new
charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.
As has long
been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in
multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking”
conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of
“collusion” with Russia.
With the caveat that even this
news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories
about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by
the New
York Times:
A senior Justice Department
official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.
Attorney General William Barr
sent a letter
to congress summarizing Mueller’s conclusions. The money line quoted
the Mueller report:
[T]he investigation did not establish
that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian
government in its election interference activities.
Over the weekend, the Times tried
to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these
years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As
with most press coverage, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was
supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as apposed to religious
allegory, with Mueller cast as the hero sent to slay the monster.
The Special Prosecutor
literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday
Night Live cast members singing “All
I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller
please come through, because the only option is a coup.”
The Times story
today tried to preserve Santa Mueller’s reputation, noting Trump’s Attorney
General William Barr’s reaction was an “endorsement” of the fineness of
Mueller’s work:
In an apparent endorsement of
an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,”
Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller
from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.
Mueller, in other words, never
stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said
for the news media?
For those anxious to keep the
dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia
“contacts,” inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate
piece by Peter Baker, the paper noted the Mueller news had dire
consequences for the press:
It will be a reckoning for
President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special
counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and,
yes, for the system as a whole…
This is a damning page one
admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its
other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper
also ran suggesting “We
don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is
guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for
a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really
add up?”
The paper was signaling it
understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like
itself made galactic errors by betting heavily on a new,
politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of
the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone
should have seen
coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues
heading into 2020.
Nothing Trump is accused of
from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a
group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base.
As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a
poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe
is a “witch hunt.”
Stories have been coming out
for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,”
as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.
Openly using such
language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have
to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match
audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the
journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.
There will be people
protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37
indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The
meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing
grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will
still investigate, and…
Stop. Just stop. Any
journalist who goes there is making it worse.
For years, every pundit and
Democratic pol in Washington hyped every
new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy
Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and
overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their
political trouble to prosecute.
The biggest thing this affair
has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a
long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and
shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.
The story hyped from the start
was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian
spooks who’d helped him win the election.
The betrayal narrative was not
reported as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as
well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing –
crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will
die in jail.”
In the early months of this
scandal, the New York Times said Trump’s campaign had “repeated
contacts” with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us
our spy agencies were
withholding intelligence from the new President out of fear he was
compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like
Israel not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have “leverages
of pressure” on Trump.
CNN told
us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S.
intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the
investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of
“high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing
short of treasonous.”
Hillary Clinton insisted
Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d
been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s
pretty hard not to.” Harry Reid similarly said he had “no doubt” that the
Trump campaign was “in
on the deal” to help Russians with the leak.
None of this has been walked
back. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the
FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence,
that would soar over the “overwhelming and bipartisan” standard, and Nancy
Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.
There was never real gray area
here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t,
news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this
error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD
included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming
back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the
media.”
Of course, there won’t be such
a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and
unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on
reporting things we can’t confirm.
#Russiagate debuted as a media
phenomenon in mid-summer, 2016. The roots of the actual story, i.e. when the
multi-national investigation began, go back much further, to the previous year
at least. Oddly, that origin tale has not been nailed down yet, and blue-state
audiences don’t seem terribly interested in it, either.
By June and July of 2016, bits
of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had
been funded by the Democratic National Committeethrough the law firm
Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS),
were already in the ether.
The Steele report occupies the
same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD
screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With
Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private
assertions.
Some early stories, like a
July 4, 2016 piece by Franklin Foer in Slate called “Putin’s
Puppet,” outlined future Steele themes in “circumstantial” form. But the
actual dossier, while it influenced a number of pre-election Trump-Russia news
stories (notably one by
Michael Isiskoff of Yahoo! that would be used
in a FISA warrant application), didn’t make it into print for a while.
Though it was shopped to at
least nine news organizations during the summer and fall of 2016, no
one bit, for the good reason that news organizations couldn’t verify its
“revelations.”
The Steele claims were
explosive if true. The ex-spy reported Trump aide Carter Page had been offered
fees on a big new slice of the oil giant Rosneft if he could help get sanctions
against Russia lifted. He also said Trump lawyer Michael Cohen went to Prague
for “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated
operators/hackers.”
Most famously, he wrote the
Kremlin had kompromat of Trump “deriling” [sic] a bed once used by
Barack and Michelle Obama by “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a
'golden showers' (urination) show.”
This was too good of a story
not to do. By hook or crook, it had to come out. The first salvo was by
David Corn of Mother Jones on October 31, 2016: “A
Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to
Cultivate Donald Trump.”
The piece didn’t have pee,
Prague, or Page in it, but it did say Russian intelligence had material that
could “blackmail” Trump. It was technically kosher to print because Corn wasn’t
publishing the allegations themselves, merely that the FBI had taken possession
of them.
A bigger pretext was needed to
get the other details out. This took place just after the election, when four
intelligence officials presented copies of the dossier to both President-Elect
Trump and outgoing President Obama.
From his
own memos, we know FBI Director James Comey, ostensibly evincing concern
for Trump’s welfare, told the new President he was just warning him about what
was out there, as possible blackmail material:
I wasn’t saying [the Steele
report] was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported
and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and
were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the
excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were
keeping it very close-hold [sic].
Comey’s generous warning to Trump
about not providing a “news hook,” along with a promise to keep it all
“close-held,” took place on January 6, 2017. Within four days, basically the
entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting and
had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press
thought this was weird or warranted comment.
Even Donald Trump was probably
smart enough to catch the hint when, of all outlets, it was CNN that first
broke the story of “Classified documents presented last week to Trump” on
January 10.
At the same time, Buzzfeed made
the historic decision to publish the entire Steele dossier, bringing
years of pee into our lives. This move birthed the Russiagate phenomenon as a
never-ending, minute-to-minute factor in American news coverage.
Comey was right. We couldn’t
have reported this story without a “hook.” Therefore the reports surrounding
Steele technically weren’t about the allegations themselves, but rather the
journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another.
Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.
This trick has been used
before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private
research. A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a
company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor
then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks
the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone
wins.
This same trick is found in
politics. A similar trajectory drove
negative headlines in the scandal surrounding New Jersey’s Democratic
Senator Bob Menendez, who was said to be under investigation by the FBI for
underage sex crimes (although some were
skeptical). The initial story didn’t hold up, but led to other
investigations.
Same with the so-called “Arkansas
project,” in which millions of Republican-friendly private research dollars
produced enough noise about the Whitewater scandal to create years of headlines
about the Clintons. Swiftboating was another example. Private oppo isn’t
inherently bad. In fact it has led to some incredible scoops, including Enron.
But reporters usually know to be skeptical of private info, and figure the
motives of its patrons into the story.
The sequence of events in that
second week of January, 2017 will now need to be heavily re-examined. We now
know, from
his own testimony, that former Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper had some kind of role in helping CNN do its report, presumably by
confirming part of the story, perhaps through an intermediary or two (there is
some controversy over whom exactly was contacted, and when).
Why would real security
officials litigate this grave matter through the media? Why were the world’s
most powerful investigative agencies acting like they were trying to move a
stock, pushing a private, unverified report that even Buzzfeed could
see had factual issues? It made
no sense at the time, and makes less now.
In January of 2017, Steele’s
pile of allegations became public, read by millions. “It is not just
unconfirmed,” Buzzfeed admitted.
“It includes some clear errors.”
Buzzfeed’s decision
exploded traditional journalistic standards against knowingly publishing
material whose veracity you doubt. Although a few media ethicistswondered
at it, this seemed not to bother the rank-and-file in the business. Buzzfeed chief
Ben Smith is still proud
of his decision today. I think this was because many reporters
believed the report was true.
When I read the report, I was
in shock. I thought it read like fourth-rate suspense fiction (I should know: I
write fourth-rate suspense fiction). Moreover it seemed edited both for public
consumption and to please Steele’s DNC patrons.
Steele wrote of Russians
having a file of “compromising information” on Hillary Clinton, only this file
supposedly lacked “details/evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior” or
“embarrassing conduct.”
We were meant to believe the
Russians, across decades of dirt-digging, had an empty kompromat file
on Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of human tabloid headline Bill Clinton? This
point was made more than once in the reports, as if being emphasized for the
reading public.
There were other curious
lines, including the bit about Russians having “moles” in the DNC, plus some
linguistic details that made me wonder at the nationality of the report author.
Still, who knew? It could be
true. But even the most cursory review showed the report had issues and would
need a lot of confirming. This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat
on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, held hearings on March 20,
2017 that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact. From
Schiff’s opening statement:
According to Christopher
Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high
regard by U.S. Intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a
secret meeting with Igor Sechin (SEH-CHIN), CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft… Page
is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of
the company.
I was stunned watching this.
It’s generally understood that members of congress, like reporters, make an
effort to vet at least their prepared remarks before making them public.
But here was Schiff, telling
the world Trump aide Carter Page had been offered huge fees on a 19% stake in
Rosneft – a company with a $63 billion market
capitalization – in a secret meeting with a Russian oligarch who was also said
to be “a KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s.”
(Schiff meant “FSB agent.” The
inability of #Russiagaters to remember Russia is not the Soviet Union became
increasingly maddening over time. Donna Brazile still hasn’t deleted her tweet
about how “The
Communists are now dictating the terms of the debate.” )
Schiff’s speech raised
questions. Do we no longer have to worry about getting accusations right if the
subject is tied to Russiagate? What if Page hadn’t done any of these things? To
date, he hasn’t been charged with anything. Shouldn’t a member of congress
worry about this?
A few weeks after that
hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian
companies mentioned in his reports. In a written
submission, Steele said his information was “raw” and “needed to be
analyzed and further investigated/verified.” He also wrote that (at least as
pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report “with the
intention that it be republished to the world at large.”
That itself was a curious
statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the
fall of 2016, but this was his legal position. This story about Steele’s
British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United
States, apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington
Times.
I contacted Schiff’s office to
ask if the congressman if he knew about Steele’s admission that his report
needed verifying, and if that changed his view of it at all. The response
(emphasis mine):
The dossier compiled by former
British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and which was leaked publicly
several months ago contains information that may be pertinent to our
investigation. This is true regardless of whether it was ever intended for
public dissemination. Accordingly, the Committee hopes to speak with Mr.
Steele in order to help substantiate or refute each of the
allegations contained in the dossier.
Schiff had not spoken to
Steele before the hearing, and read out the allegations knowing they were
unsubstantiated.
The Steele report was the
Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of
news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most
salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe
from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were
unable to independently produce Steele’s results in the lab. Failure to reckon
with this corrupted the narrative from the start.
For years, every hint the
dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast
on Steele’s revelations, the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter
Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been
there. Post reporters, Miller said, “literally spent weeks and months trying to
run down” the Cohen story.
“We sent reporters through
every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if
he was ever there,” he said, “and came away empty.”
This was heads-I-win,
tails-you-lose reporting. One assumes if Miller found Cohen’s name in a hotel
ledger, it would have been on page 1 of the Post. The converse didn’t
get a mention in Miller’s own paper. He only told the story during a
discussion aired
by C-SPAN about a new book he’d published. Only The Daily
Caller and a few conservative blogs picked it up.
It was the same when Bob
Woodward said, “I did not find [espionage or collusion]… Of course I looked for
it, looked for it hard.”
The celebrated Watergate
muckraker – who once said he’d succumbed
to “groupthink”in the WMD episode and added, “I blame myself mightily for
not pushing harder” – didn’t push very hard here, either. News that he’d tried
and failed to find collusion didn’t get into his own paper. It only came out
when Woodward was promoting his book Fear in a discussion with
conservative host Hugh Hewitt.
When Michael Cohen testified
before congress and denied under oath ever being in Prague, it was the same.
Few commercial news outlets bothered to take note of the implications this had
for their previous reports. Would a man clinging to a plea deal lie to congress
on national television about this issue?
There was a
CNN story, but the rest of the coverage was all in conservative outlets –
the National
Review, Fox, The
Daily Caller. The Washington Post’s response was to run an
editorial sneering at “How
conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen’s testimony.”
Perhaps worst of all was the
episode involving Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff. He had already
been part of one strange tale: the FBI double-dipping when it sought a FISA
warrant to conduct secret surveillance of Carter Page, the would-be mastermind
who was supposed to have brokered a deal with oligarch Sechin.
In its FISA application, the
FBI included both the unconfirmed Steele report and Isikoff’s September 23,
2016 Yahoo! story, “U.S.
Intel Officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The Isikoff story,
which claimed Page had met with “high ranking sanctioned officials” in Russia,
had relied upon Steele as an unnamed source.
This was similar to a
laundering technique used in the WMD episode called “stove-piping,” i.e.
officials using the press to “confirm” information the officials themselves fed
the reporter.
But there was virtually no
non-conservative press about this problem apart from a Washington
Post story pooh-poohing the issue. (Every news story that casts any doubt
on the collusion issue seems to meet with an instantaneous “fact check” in
the Post.) The Post insisted the FISA issue wasn’t serious among
other things because Steele was not the “foundation” of Isikoff’s piece.
Isikoff was perhaps the
reporter most familiar with Steele. He and Corn of Mother Jones, who also
dealt with the ex-spy, wrote a bestselling book that relied upon theories from
Steele, Russian Roulette, including a rumination on the “pee” episode. Yet
Isikoff in late 2018 suddenly said he believed the Steele report would turn out
to be “mostly
false.”
Once again, this only came out
via a podcast, John Ziegler’s “Free Speech Broadcasting” show. Here’s a transcript
of the relevant section:
Isikoff: When you actually get
into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, you know, we
have not seen the evidence to support them. And in fact there is good
grounds to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven,
and are likely false.
Ziegler: That’s...
Isikoff: I think it’s a mixed
record at best at this point, things could change, Mueller may yet produce
evidence that changes this calculation. But based on the public record at this
point I have to say that most of the specific allegations have not been borne
out.
Ziegler: That’s interesting to
hear you say that, Michael because as I’m sure you know, your book was kind of
used to validate the pee tape, for lack of a better term.
Isikoff: Yeah. I think we had
some evidence in there of an event that may have inspired the pee tape and
that was the visit that Trump made with a number of characters who later showed
up in Moscow, specifically Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone to this raunchy Las
Vegas nightclub where one of the regular acts was a skit called “Hot For
Teacher” in which dancers posing as college Co-Ed’s urinated – or
simulated urinating on their professor. Which struck me as an odd coincidence
at best. I think, you know, it is not implausible that event may have
inspired...
Ziegler: An urban legend?
Isikoff: ...allegations that
appeared in the Steele dossier.
Isikoff delivered this story
with a laughing tone. He seamlessly transitioned to what he then called the
“real” point, i.e. “the irony is Steele may be right, but it wasn’t the Kremlin
that had sexual kompromat on Donald Trump, it was the National
Enquirer.”
Recapping: the reporter who
introduced Steele to the world (his September 23, 2016 story was the first to
reference him as a source), who wrote a book that even he concedes was seen as
“validating” the pee tape story, suddenly backtracks and says the whole thing
may have been based on a Las Vegas strip act, but it doesn’t matter because
Stormy Daniels, etc.
Another story of this type
involved a court case in which Webzilla and parent company XBT sued Steele and
Buzzfeed over the mention their firm in one of the memos. It came out in court
testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a 2009
post on CNN’s "iReports” page.
Asked if he understood these
posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who’d been fact-checked,
Steele replied, “I
do not.”
This comical detail was similar
to news that the second British Mi6 dossier released just before the Iraq
invasion had been plagiarized in
part from a thirteen year-old student thesis from California State University,
not even by intelligence people, but by mid-level functionaries in Tony Blair’s
press office.
There were so many profiles of
Steele as an “astoundingly
diligent” spymaster straight out
of LeCarre: he was routinely described as
a LeCarre-ian grinder, similar in appearance and manner to the legendary George
Smiley. He was a man in the shadows whose bookish intensity was belied by his
“average,” “neutral,” “quiet,” demeanor, being “more low-key than Smiley.” One
would think it might have rated a mention that the new “Smiley” was cutting and
pasting text like a community college freshman. But the story barely made news.
This has been a consistent
pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or
weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three
(in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the
same publication.
That’s been rare. More often,
when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply
ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative
outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.
This is a major structural
flaw of the new
fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers
Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If
neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies,
mistakes accumulate quickly.
This has been the main
reportorial difference between Russiagate and the WMD affair. Despite David
Remnick’s post-invasion protestations that “nobody got [WMD] completely right,”
the Iraq war was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more
people who did get it right, and protested
on the streets. There was open skepticism of Bush claims dotting the press
landscape from the start, with people like Jack Shafer tearing
apart every Judith Miller story in print. Most reporters are Democrats
and the people hawking the WMD story were mostly Republicans, so there was at
least some political space for protest.
Russiagate happened in an
opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump
politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming
forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public
skepticism a complicated proposition.
Early in the scandal, I
appeared on To The Point, a California-based public radio show hosted
by Warren Olney, with Corn of Mother Jones. I knew David a little and
had been friendly with him. He once hosted a book event for me in Washington.
In the program, however, the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn
said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:
So Democrats getting
overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible]
true…? Well, tell me a political issue where that doesn’t happen. I think
that’s looking at the wrong end of the telescope.
I wrote him later and
suggested that since we’re in the press, and not really about anything except
avoiding “things that may not be true,” maybe we had different responsibilities
than “Democrats”? He wrote back:
Feel free to police the Trump
opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that's
just not high on my personal list.
Other reporters spoke of an
internal struggle. When the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency
was met with exultation in the media, New Yorker writer Adrian Chen,
who broke the original IRA story, was hesitant
to come forward with some mild qualms about the way the story was
being reported:
“Either I could stay silent
and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian
threat,” he said, “or I could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies.”
After writing, “Confessions
of a Russiagate Skeptic,” poor Blake Hounsell of Politicotook such a
beating on social media, he ended up denouncing
himself a year later.
“What I meant to write is,
I wasn’t skeptical,” he said.
Years ago, in the midst of the
WMD affair, Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the paper’s
standard had moved from “Don’t get it first, get it right” to “Get it first and
get it right.” From there, Okrent
wrote, “the next devolution was an obvious one.”
We’re at that next devolution:
first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once
“reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say
barely ever, and then only by accident.
Early on, I was so amazed by
the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep
a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of
the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect
them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.
In some cases the stories are
only partly wrong, as in the case of the famed “17
intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacking” story (it was
actually four: the Director of National Intelligence “hand-picking” a team from
the FBI, CIA, and NSA).
In other cases the stories
were blunt false starts, resulting in ugly sets of matching headlines:
Washington Post, December
31, 2016.
Washington Post, Jan. 2,
2017.
“Trump
Campaign Aides had repeated contacts with Russian Intelligence,” published
by the Times on Valentine’s Day, 2017, was an important,
narrative-driving “bombshell” that looked dicey from the start. The piece
didn’t say whether the contact was witting or unwitting, whether the discussions
were about business or politics, or what the contacts supposedly were at all.
Normally a reporter would want
to know what the deal is before he or she runs a story accusing people of
having dealings with foreign spies. “Witting” or “Unwitting” ought to be a huge
distinction, for instance. It soon after came out that people like former CIA
chief John Brennan don’t think this is the case. “Frequently, people who are on
a treasonous path do not know they’re on a treasonous path,” he
said, speaking of Trump’s circle.
This seemed a dangerous
argument, the kind of thing that led to trouble in the McCarthy years. But
let’s say the contacts were serious. From a reporting point of view, you’d
still need to know exactly what the nature of such contacts were before you run
that story, because the headline implication is grave. Moreover you’d need
to know it well enough to report it, i.e. it’s not enough to be told a convincing
story off-the-record, you need to be able to share with readers enough so that
they can characterize the news themselves.
Not to the Times, which
ran the article without the specifics. Months later, Comey blew up this
“contacts” story in public, saying, “in
the main, it was not true.“
As was the case with the “17
agencies” error, which only got fixed when Clapper testified in congress and
was forced to make the correction under oath, the “repeated contacts” story was
only disputed when Comey testified in congress, this time before
the Senate Intelligence Committee. How many other errors of this type are
waiting to be disclosed?
Even the mistakes caught were
astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump “as a
candidate” instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow
to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and Ross
was suspended.
Bloomberg reported
Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to
be of other
individuals’ records. Fortune said C-SPAN
was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted
coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times also ran
the story, and it’s still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own “internal
routing error” likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.
CNN has its own separate
sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network’s journalists resigned after
a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian
investment fund was retracted. Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric
Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed
Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of
an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.
In another CNN scoop gone
awry, “Email
pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters
were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign
had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as
what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction.
The worst stories were the
ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After
Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New
York Times on Feb 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to
divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags
like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting.
The Times ran this
quote high up:
“This is pretty typical
for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief
executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation
campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost
systematically.”
About a year after this story
came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported
that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon
Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity
in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia
preferred the Republican.
The Times quoted a
New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme:
We orchestrated an elaborate
‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was
amplified on social media by a Russian botnet…
The Parkland story was iffy
enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it,
and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence
official Clint Watts, subsequently said he
was “not convinced” on the whole “bot thing.”
But when one of your top
sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your
article, you should at least take the quote out, or put an update online. No
luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.
Russiagate institutionalized
one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly
to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots
and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories
live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get
jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc.
With Russiagate the national
press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and
conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities
and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially
said the Russian traded
sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news
cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to
undermine democracy, a “real-life Red Sparrow,” as ABC put it.
But a judge threw out the sex
charge after “five minutes” when it turned out to be based on a single
joke text to a friend who had taken Butina’s car for inspection.
It’s pretty hard to undo
public perception you’re a prostitute once it’s been in a headline, and, worse,
the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like “Maria
Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan” online in
the New York Times.
Here a reporter might protest:
how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn’t I
believe them?
How about because, authorities
have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It
doesn’t take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in
the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of
deceiving the media.
As noted before, from World
War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents to the “missile
gap” that wasn’t (the “gap” was leaked to the press before the Soviets had
even one operational ICBM) to the Gulf of Tonkin mess to all the
smears of people like Martin Luther King, it’s a wonder newspapers listen to
whispers from government sources at all.
In the Reagan years National
Security Adviser John Poindexter spread false stories about Libyan terrorist
plots to The Wall Street Journal and other papers. In the Bush years,
Dick Cheney et al were selling manure by the truckload about various
connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, infamously including a story that bomber
Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.
The New York Times ran
a story that Atta was in Prague in late October of 2001, even giving a
date of the meeting with Iraqis, April 8, or “just five months before the
terrorist attacks.” The Prague story was another example of a tale that seemed
shaky because American officials were putting the sourcing first on foreign
intelligence, then on reporters themselves. Cheney cited the Prague report in
subsequent TV appearances, one of many instances of feeding reporters tidbits
and then selling reports as independent confirmation.
It wasn’t until three years
later, in 2004, that Times reporter James Risen definitively killed
the Atta-in-Prague canard (why is it always Prague?) in a story entitled “No
evidence of meeting with Iraqi.” By then, of course, it was too late.
The Times also held
a major dissenting piece by Risen about the WMD case, “C.I.A. Aides
Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports,” until days after war started. This
is what happens when you start thumbing the scale.
This failure to demand
specifics has been epidemic in Russiagate, even when good reporters have been
involved. One of the biggest “revelations” of this era involved a story that
was broken first by a terrible reporter (the Guardian’s Luke Harding)
and followed up by a good one (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker). The key
detail involved the elusive origin story of Russiagate.
Mayer’s piece, the March 12,
2018 “Christopher
Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” in the New Yorker, impacted
the public mainly by seeming to bolster the credentials of the dossier author.
But it contained an explosive nugget far down. Mayer reported Robert Hannigan,
then-head of the GCHQ (the British analog to the NSA) intercepted a “stream of
illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior
to August 2016. Hannigan flew to the U.S. and briefed CIA director John Brennan
about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original
FBI investigation.
When I read that, a million
questions came to mind, but first: what did “illicit” mean?
If something “illicit” had
been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several
conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally),
this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge.
If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we
deserve to know?
I asked the Guardian: “Was any
attempt made to find out what those communications were? How was the existence
of these communications confirmed? Did anyone from the Guardian see or hear
these intercepts, or transcripts?”
Their one-sentence reply:
The Guardian has strict and
rigorous procedures when dealing with source material.
That’s the kind of answer
you’d expect from a transnational bank, or the army, not a newspaper.
I asked Mayer the same
questions. She was more forthright, noting that, of course, the story had
originally been broken by
Harding, whose own report said “the precise nature of these exchanges has
not been made public.”
She added that “afterwards I
independently confirmed aspects of [Harding’s piece] with several well-informed
sources,” and “spent months on the Steele story [and] traveled to the UK twice
for it.” But, she wrote, “the Russiagate story, like all reporting on sensitive
national security issues, is difficult.”
I can only infer she couldn’t
find out what “illicit” meant despite proper effort. The detail was published
anyway. It may not have seemed like a big deal, but I think it was.
To be clear, I don’t
necessarily disbelieve the idea that there were “illicit” contacts between
Trump and Russians in early 2015 or before. But if there were such contacts, I
can’t think of any legitimate reason why their nature should be withheld from
the public.
If authorities can share
reasons for concern with foreign countries like Israel, why should American
voters not be so entitled? Moreover the idea that we need to keep things secret
to protect sources and methods and “tradecraft” (half the press corps became
expert in goofy spy language over the last few years, using terms like “SIGINT”
like they’ve known them their whole lives), why are we leaking
news of our ability to hear Russian officials cheering Trump’s win?
Failure to ask follow-up
questions happened constantly with this story. One of the first reports
that went sideways involved a similar dynamic: the contention that some leaked
DNC emails were forgeries.
MSNBC’s “Intelligence
commentator” Malcolm Nance, perhaps the most enthusiastic source of questionable
#Russiagate news this side of Twitter conspiracist Louise Mensch, tweeted on
October 11, 2016: “#PodestaEmails are
already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not
even professionally done.”
As noted in The Intercept and
elsewhere, this was re-reported by the likes of David
Frum (a key member of the club that has now contributed to both the
WMD and Russiagate panics) and MSNBC host Joy
Reid. The reports didn’t stop until roughly October of 2016, among other
things because the Clinton campaign kept suggesting to reporters the emails
were fake. This could have been stopped sooner if examples of a forgery had
been demanded from the Clinton campaign earlier.
Another painful practice that
became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to
what they’ve told you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March
5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application
involving Trump or his campaign. “I can deny it,” he said.
It soon after came out this
wasn’t true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small
misstatement by Clapper, because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed
in a tweet he’d had his “wires
tapped.” Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately
so, but in addition to the Page news, it later came out there had been a FISA
warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the
subject of “incidental”
surveillance.
Whether or not this was
meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions.
The important thing is, Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn’t
know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely.
Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he
had Clapper
back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine,
never confronting him about the issue.
Reporters repeatedly got
burned and didn’t squawk about it. Where are the outraged stories about all the
scads of anonymous “people familiar with the matter” who put reporters in
awkward spots in the last years? Why isn’t McClatchy demanding the heads of
whatever “four people with knowledge” convinced them to double
down on the Cohen-in-Prague story?
Why isn’t every reporter who
used “New Knowledge” as a source about salacious Russian
troll stories out for their heads (or the heads of the congressional
sources who passed this stuff on), after reports they faked Russian trolling?
How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use New
Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi
Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate?
How do the Guardian’s editors
not already have Harding’s head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the
most dubious
un-retracted story in modern history – the tale that the most watched
human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been visited in the Ecuadorian
embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I’d be dragging Harding’s
“well placed source” into the office and beating him with a hose until he
handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence.
The lack of blowback over
episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to
the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources. Too often, it
felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to
take the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no
sense of institutional self-esteem about this.
Being on any team is a bad
look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump
or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that
route?
This posture has all been
couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan
– the same Brennan who should himself have faced charges for lying
to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff – need the
press to whine
on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need
the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking
R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don’t have better things to do than that
“work”?
This catalogue of factual
errors and slavish stenography will stand out when future analysts look back at
why the “MSM” became a joke during this period, but they were only a symptom of
a larger problem. The bigger issue was a radical change in approach.
A lot of #Russiagate coverage
became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called “connecting
the dots.” This was allowed because the press committed to a collusion
narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that
would never be permitted in normal times.
Such was the case with Jonathan
Chait’s #Russiagate opus, “PRUMP TUTIN: Will Trump be Meeting With his
Counterpart – or his Handler?” The story was also pitched as “What if Trump has
been a Russian asset since 1987?” which recalls the joke from The Wire: “Yo, Herc, what if your mother
and father never met?” What if isn’t a good place to be in this
business.
This cover story (!) in New
York magazine was released in advance of a planned “face-to-face” summit
between Trump and Putin, and posited Trump had been under Russian control for
decades. Chait noted Trump visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and came back
“fired up with political ambition.” He offered the possibility that this was a
coincidence, but added:
Indeed, it seems slightly
insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump
and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely.
I searched the Chait article
up and down for reporting that would justify the suggestion Trump had been a
Russian agent dating back to the late eighties, when, not that it matters,
Russia was a different country called the Soviet Union.
Only two facts in the piece
could conceivably have been used to support the thesis: Trump met with a
visiting Soviet official in 1986, and visited the Soviet Union in 1987. That’s
it. That’s your cover story.
Worse, Chait’s theory was
first espoused in Lyndon Larouche’s “Elephants
and Donkeys” newsletter in 1987, under a headline, “Do Russians have a
Trump card?” This is barrel-scraping writ large.
It’s a mania. Putin is
literally in our underpants. Maybe, if we’re lucky, New York might
someday admit its
report claiming Russians set up an anti-masturbation hotline to trap
and blackmail random Americans is suspicious, not just because it seems absurd
on its face, but because its source is the same “New Knowledge” group that
admitted to faking Russian influence operations in Alabama.
But what retraction is
possible for the Washington Post headline, “How
will Democrats cope if Putin starts playing dirty tricks for Bernie Sanders
(again)?” How to reverse Rachel Maddow’s spiel about Russia perhaps
shutting down heat across America during a cold wave? There’s no correction for
McCarthyism and fearmongering.
This ultimately will be the
endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything
like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the
Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to
radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as
the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone
assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to
Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will
remain.
It’s hard to know what policy
changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the
Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.
I didn’t really address the
case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told
early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion
has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by
those same intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of
things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The
government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server, the kind of detail that used
to make reporters nervous.
We won’t know how much of any
of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security
services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh
eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking
what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on
Trump and Russia.
The WMD mess had massive
real-world negative impact, leading to over a hundred thousand deaths and
trillions in lost taxpayer dollars. Unless Russiagate leads to a nuclear
conflict, we’re unlikely to ever see that level of consequence.
Still, Russiagate has led to
unprecedented cooperation between the government and Internet platforms like
Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all of which are censoring pages on the left,
right, and in between in the name of preventing the “sowing of discord.” The
story also had a profound impact on the situation in places like Syria, where
Russian and American troops have sat across the Euphrates River from one
another, two amped-up
nuclear powers at a crossroads.
As a purely journalistic
failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of
the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s
led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become
sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent
institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.
We had the sense to eventually
look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped
that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of
self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around,
this story will destroy it.
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