Russiagate a bonanza for media but a blow to journalistic credibility
The New York Times’ anti-Trump campaigning won millions of subscribers but lost it credibility.
Donald Trump may have saved the business models of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have attracted millions of digital subscribers to their anti-Trump campaigning but in the process destroyed the credibility of their own journalism.
The findings of the Mueller report last week came as no surprise to anyone who has closely followed the three-year scam claiming Trump and members of his family directly sought Russian interference in the November 2016 US presidential election. This column argued as far back as May 28 last year that the bogus Russiagate conspiracy theory was giving the Times and Post a financial lifeline.
The best commentator on the Russia probe has been Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and co-founder of the online news site, The Intercept. Greenwald is not a conservative and is no fan of Trump, having criticised the President’s tax and business dealings. Greenwald won a Pulitzer Prize for The Guardian over the Edward Snowden CIA/NSA leaks scandal and subsequent defection to Russia in 2013.
In a blistering debate you can see on Greenwald’s Intercept post of March 26, he demolishes Democrat author, Trump/Russia believer and political lecturer David Cay Johnston in a session hosted by Democracy Now that every sceptic of media power really needs to watch from start to finish.
Greenwald says many senior journalists and big media organisations should now admit their mistakes and apologise to readers and viewers.
He is particularly angry at MSNBC prime-time host Rachel Maddow, a $US10 million-a-year reporter still pumping out Russia conspiracy sludge even after the Mueller findings were released in summary by Trump Attorney-General William Barr.
Greenwald buys into the financial rewards argument.
He told Tucker Carlson on FoxNews on Monday night US time: “ (MSNBC) should have their top hosts on prime time go before the cameras and hang their heads in shame and apologise for lying to people for three straight years, exploiting their fears to great profit. These are people who were on the verge of losing their jobs. That whole network was about to collapse. This whole scam saved them.”
But neither MSNBC nor the Times or have apologised for the biggest media blunder since the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fiasco leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Nor have our ABC or the Channel 9 Fairfax papers explained to their viewers and readers why they swallowed a story they should have known was politically motivated, at least since the discrediting of the infamous Christopher Steele Russia document paid for by the Democrat National Committee and rejected by many mainstream media organisations before being run on the Mother Jones political website on October 31 2016.
Will Four Corners apologise for its three-part series last year hosted by Sarah Ferguson and grandly called “The Story of the Century”? This column on June 18 last year criticised the reporting of Four Corners for relying so heavily on former Obama national intelligence director James Clapper, the man who leaked the discredited Steele dossier about Trump’s nocturnal activities in a Moscow hotel bed to CNN and then lied to Congress about it.
Much of the ABC was last week using the same lines the Times and Post were in the US in response to Mueller: we need to see the full document and we only have Attorney-General Barr’s word for it that his four-page summary is accurate.
Here’s how Greenwald demolished the media’s insistence that Trump still may be a Russian asset (despite Mueller probing exactly that for 22 months) and suggestions Barr may be hiding the truth: “As for him (Trump) being a Russian asset it’s so irresponsible … because the reality is the conflict between the US and Russia is at … a higher level than it has been for … probably decades.
“How can you say Donald Trump is a stooge of the Kremlin when he is right now trying to remove one of Vladimir Putin’s client regime states in Venezuela or when he’s trying to bully Angela Merkel out of buying Russian natural gas, probably the thing that’s most important to the Russian economy. Or when he sold lethal arms to the Ukrainians … something Obama refused to do on the grounds it would be provocative to Russia. Or when he bombed Putin’s client state in Syria … This whole narrative that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin is idiocy. It is completely irrational … It is time to stop these dangerous conspiracy theories,” he told Democracy Now.
“Bill Barr has been friends with Robert Mueller for 30 years. They come from the same Republican circles in the Department of Justice. They both worked together at the … Bush 41 (George Bush Senior) Justice Department. All we heard for 20 months was that Robert Mueller was the man of the greatest integrity.
“The very idea … that he would allow Bill Barr to run around making false and misleading distortions about what the Mueller team found and not one person on the Mueller team … would stand up and say ‘wait a minute, this is distorting what our finding are’ is laughable.”
Greenwald’s March 26 post on The Intercept points to what he describes as the definitive article on Russiagate by journalist Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone. It is the best single-source dissection of the affair I have read anywhere.
Taibbi’s piece raises an issue this column often mentions: the need for journalists not to allow the conventions of journalistic source protection to be used by contacts to distort the truth and thereby publish deliberate lies to readers and viewers. From 2016, many sources within the US intelligence community have been able to use journalists to get false information about Trump and Russia published.
The Steele document is simply the first of many false journalistic narratives dissected by Taibbi. He even quotes Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff, one of the authors of the book Russian Roulette on the Steele Dossier, saying: “There is good ground to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven and are likely false.”
In fact, the hook for the eventual disgraceful decision by BuzzFeed to publish the entire dossier unchecked was simply the leaked news that sacked FBI director James Comey had warned Trump of its existence.
This is an old trick by police and intelligence sources. False material that does not meet normal standards of publication is finally aired on the basis of a leak about warnings to governments of its existence.
Russiagate raises many questions about the nature of raw unchecked intelligence and how law enforcement and security agencies can manipulate unproven material to destroy targets.
Domestically, think about the Australian Federal Police and incorrect material leaked to journalists to damage Indian doctor Mohammad Haneef in 2007, until the truth was revealed by this paper’s Hedley Thomas.
Reflect too on why a federal Independent Commission Against Corruption could be dangerous. We have seen much legal and media dishonesty at the NSW ICAC, which has for years used The Sydney Morning Herald to damage targets, many of whom are not prosecuted. NSW Deputy Senior Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen was just the most high-profile case.
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