Fake
News on Russia and Other Official Enemies
The New York Times, 1917–2017
By Edward S. Herman
August 17,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- It has been amusing to watch the New York
Times and other mainstream media outlets
express their dismay over the rise and spread of
“fake news.” These publications take it as an
obvious truth that what they provide is
straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting.
They do offer such news, but they also provide a
steady flow of their own varied forms of fake
news, often by disseminating false or misleading
information supplied to them by the national
security state, other branches of government,
and sites of corporate power.
An
important form of mainstream media fake news is
that which is presented while suppressing
information that calls the preferred news into
question. This was the case with “The Lie That
Wasn’t Shot Down,” the title of a January 18,
1988, Times editorial referring to a
propaganda claim of five years earlier that the
editors had swallowed and never looked into any
further. The lie—that the Soviets knew that
Korean airliner 007, which they shot down on
August 31, 1983, was a civilian plane—was
eventually uncovered by congressman Lee
Hamilton, not by the Times.
Mainstream media fake news is especially likely
where a party line is quickly formed on a topic,
with any deviations therefore immediately
dismissed as naïve, unpatriotic, or simply
wrong. In a dramatic illustration, for a book
chapter entitled “Worthy and Unworthy Victims,”
Noam Chomsky and I showed that coverage by
Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and the
New York Times of the 1984 murder of the
priest Jerzy Popieluzko in Communist Poland, a
dramatic and politically useful event for the
politicized Western mainstream media, exceeded
all their coverage of the murders of a hundred
religious figures killed in Latin America by
U.S. client states in the post-Second World War
years taken together.1
It was cheap and safe to focus heavily on the
“worthy” victim, whereas looking closely at the
deaths of those hundred would have required an
expensive and sometimes dangerous research
effort that would have upset the State
Department. But it was in effect a form of fake
news to so selectively devote coverage (and
indignation) to a politically useful victim,
while ignoring large numbers whose murder the
political establishment sought to downplay or
completely suppress.
Fake news on Russia is a Times tradition
that can be traced back at least as far as the
1917 revolution. In a classic study of the
paper’s coverage of Russia from February 1917 to
March 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz
found that “From the point of view of
professional journalism the reporting of the
Russian Revolution is nothing short of a
disaster. On the essential questions the net
effect was almost always misleading, and
misleading news is worse than none at all…. They
can fairly be charged with boundless credulity,
and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on
many occasions with a downright lack of common
sense.”2
Lippmann and Merz found that strong editorial
bias clearly fed into news reporting. The
editors’ zealous opposition to the communists
led the paper to report atrocities that never
happened, and to predict the imminent collapse
of the Bolshevik regime no fewer than ninety-one
times in three years. Journalists uncritically
accepted official statements and relied on
reports from unidentified “high authority.” This
was standard Times practice.
This
fake news performance of 1917–20 was repeated
often in the years that followed. The Soviet
Union was an enemy target up to the Second World
War, and through it all, Times coverage
was consistently hostile. With the end of the
war and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a
military rival, and soon a competing nuclear
power, the Cold War was on. In the United
States, anti-communism became a national
religion, and the Soviet Union was portrayed in
official discourse and the news media as a
global menace in urgent need of containment.
With this ideology in place and with U.S. plans
for its own global expansion of power
established, the Communist threat would help
sustain the steady growth of the
military-industrial complex and repeated
interventions to counter purported Soviet
aggressions.3
An Early Great
Crime: Guatemala
One of
the most flagrant cases in which the Soviet
threat was exploited to justify U.S.-sponsored
violence was the overthrow of the social
democratic government of Guatemala in 1954 by a
small proxy army invading from U.S. ally
Somoza’s Nicaragua. This action was provoked by
government reforms that upset U.S. officials,
including a 1947 law permitting the formation of
labor unions, and plans to buy back (at tax-rate
valuations) and distribute to landless peasants
some of the unused property owned by United
Fruit Company and other large landowners. The
United States, which had been perfectly content
with the earlier fourteen-year-long dictatorship
of Jose Ubico, could not tolerate this
democratic challenge, and the elected
government, led by Jacobo Arbenz, was soon
charged with assorted villainies, based on an
alleged Red capture of the Guatemalan
government.4
In the
pre-invasion propaganda campaign, the mainstream
media fell into line behind false charges of
extreme government repression, threats to its
neighbors, and the Communist takeover. The
Times repeatedly reported these alleged
abuses and threats from 1950 onward (my
favorite: Sidney Gruson’s “How Communists Won
Control of Guatemala,” March 1, 1953). Arbenz
and his predecessor, Juan Jose Arevalo, had
carefully avoided establishing any embassies
with Soviet bloc countries, fearing U.S.
reprisals—to no avail. Following the removal of
Arbenz and the installation of a right-wing
dictatorship, court historian Ronald Schneider,
after studying 50,000 documents seized from
Communist sources in Guatemala, found that not
only did Communists never control the country,
but that the Soviet Union “made no significant
or even material investment in the Arbenz
regime,” and was at the time too preoccupied
with internal problems to concern itself with
Central America.5
The coup government quickly attacked and
decimated the new social groups that had formed
in the democratic era, mainly peasant, worker,
and teacher organizations. Arbenz had won 65
percent of the votes in a free election, but the
“liberator” Castillo Armas quickly won a
“plebiscite” with 99.6 percent of the vote.
Although this is a result familiar in
totalitarian regimes, the mainstream media had
by then lost interest in Guatemala, barely
mentioning this electoral outcome. The Times
had claimed in 1950 that U.S. Guatemala policy
“is not trying to block social and economic
progress but is interested in seeing that
Guatemala becomes a liberal democracy.”6
But in the aftermath, the editors failed to note
that the result of U.S. policy was precisely to
“block social and economic progress,” through
the installation of a regime of reactionary
terror.
In 2011, more than half a century after 1954,
the Times reported that Guatemalan
president Alvaro Colom had apologized for that
“Great Crime,” the violent overthrow of the
Arbenz government, “an act of aggression to a
government starting its democratic spring.”7
The article mentions that, according to
president Colom, the Arbenz family is “seeking
an apology from the United States for its role”
in the Great Crime. The Times has never
made any apology or even acknowledgement of its
own role in the Great Crime.
Another Great
Crime: Vietnam
Fake news abounded in the Times and other
mainstream publications during the Vietnam War.
The common perception that the paper’s editors
opposed the war is misleading and essentially
false. In Without Fear or Favor, former
Times reporter Harrison Salisbury
acknowledged that in 1962, when U.S.
intervention escalated, the Times was
“deeply and consistently” supportive of the war
policy.8
He contends that the paper grew steadily more
oppositional from 1965, culminating in the
publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. But
Salisbury fails to recognize that from 1954 to
the present, the Times never abandoned
the Cold War framework and vocabulary, according
to which the United States was resisting another
nation’s “aggression” and protecting “South
Vietnam.” The paper never applied the word
aggression to this country, but used it freely
in referring to North Vietnamese actions and
those of the National Liberation Front in the
southern half of Vietnam.
The
various pauses in the U.S. bombing war in 1965
and after, in the alleged interest of “giving
peace a chance,” were also the basis of fake
news as the Johnson administration used these
temporary halts to quiet antiwar protests, while
making it clear to the Vietnamese that U.S.
officials demanded full surrender. The Times
and its colleagues swallowed this bait without a
murmur of dissent.9
Furthermore, although from 1965 onward the
Times was willing to publish more reports
that put the war in a less favorable light, it
never broke from its heavy dependence on
official sources, or from its reluctance to
confront the damage wrought on Vietnam and its
civilian population by the U.S. war machine. In
contrast with its eager pursuit of Cambodian
refugees from the Khmer Rouge after April 1975,
the paper rarely sought testimony from the
millions of Vietnamese refugees fleeing U.S.
bombing and chemical warfare. In its opinion
columns as well, the new openness was limited to
commentators who accepted the premises of the
war and would confine their criticisms to its
tactical problems and domestic costs. From
beginning to end, those who criticized the war
as an immoral campaign of sheer aggression were
excluded from the debate.10
The 1981 Papal
Assassination Attempt
The
mainstream media gave a further boost to Cold
War propaganda in reporting on the attempted
assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in
May 1981. At a time when the Reagan
administration was seeking to demonize the
Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the shooting
of the pope by Turkish fascist Ali Agca was
quickly tied to Moscow, helped by Agca’s
confession—after seventeen months of
imprisonment, interrogations, threats,
inducements, and access to the media—that the
Bulgarians and Soviet KGB were behind it all. No
credible evidence supported this connection, the
claims were implausible, and the corruption in
the process was remarkable. (Agca also
periodically claimed to be Jesus Christ.) The
case against the Bulgarians (and implicitly the
KGB) was lost even in Italy’s extremely biased
and politicized judicial framework. But the
Times bought it, and gave it prolonged,
intense, and completely unquestioning attention,
as did most of the U.S. media.
During
the 1991 Senate hearings on the nomination of
Robert Gates to head the CIA, former agency
officer Melvin Goodman testified that the CIA
knew from the start that Agca’s confessions were
false, because they had “very good penetration”
of the Bulgarian secret services. The Times
omitted this statement in its reporting on
Goodman’s testimony. During the same year, with
Bulgaria now a member of the “free world,”
conservative analyst Allen Weinstein obtained
permission to examine Bulgarian secret service
files on the assassination attempt. His mission
was widely reported, including in the Times,
but when he returned without having found
anything implicating Bulgaria or the KGB,
several papers, including the Times,
found his investigations no longer newsworthy.
Missile Gap
From
roughly 1975 to 1986, much of the reporting on
the purported “missile gap” between the United
States and the Soviet Union was little more than
fake news, with Times reporters passing
along a steady stream of inflammatory official
statements and baseless claims. An important
case occurred in the mid-1970s, as right-wing
hawks in the Ford administration were trying to
escalate the Cold War and arms race. A 1975 CIA
report had found that the Soviets were aiming
only for nuclear parity. This was
unsatisfactory, so CIA head George H. W. Bush
appointed a new team of hardliners, who soon
found that the Soviets were achieving nuclear
superiority and preparing to fight a nuclear
war. This so-called Team B report was taken at
face value in a Times front page article
of December 26, 1976, by David Binder, who
failed to mention its political bias or purpose,
and made no attempt to consult experts with
differing views. The CIA finally admitted in
1983 that the Team B estimates were
fabrications. But throughout this period, the
Times supported the case for militarization
by disseminating false information, much of it
convincingly refuted by Tom Gervasi in his
classic The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy,
a book never reviewed in the Times.
Yugoslavia and
“Humanitarian Intervention”
The
1990s wars of dismantlement in Yugoslavia
succeeded in removing an independent government
from power and replacing it with a broken
Serbian remnant and poor and unstable failed
states in Bosnia and Kosovo. It also provided
unwarranted support for the concept of
“humanitarian intervention,” which rested on a
mass of misrepresentations and selective
reporting. The demonized Serbian leader Slobodan
Milošević was not an ultra-nationalist seeking a
“Greater Serbia,” but rather a non-aligned
leader on the Western hit list who tried to help
Serb minorities in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo
remain in Yugoslavia as the United States and
the European Union supported a legally
questionable exodus by several constituent
Yugoslav Republics. He supported each of the
proposed settlements of these conflicts, which
were sabotaged by Bosnian and U.S. officials who
wanted better terms or the outright military
defeat of Serbia, ultimately achieving the
latter. Milošević had nothing to do with the
July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian
Serbs took revenge on Bosnian Muslim soldiers
who had been ravaging nearby Bosnian Serb
villages from their base in Srebrenica under
NATO protection. The several thousand Serb
civilian deaths were essentially unreported in
the mainstream media, while the numbers of
Srebrenica’s executed victims were
correspondingly inflated.11
The Putin Era
The U.S. political establishment was shocked and
delighted by the 1989–91 fall of the Soviet
Union, and its members were similarly pleased
with the policies of President Boris Yeltsin, a
virtual U.S. client, under whose rule ordinary
Russians suffered a calamitous fall in living
standards, while a small set of oligarchs were
able to loot the broken state. Yeltsin’s
election victory in 1996, greatly assisted by
U.S. consultants, advice, and money, was, for
the editors of the Times,
“A Victory for Russian Democracy.”12
They were not bothered by either the electoral
corruption, the creation of a
grand-larceny-based economic oligarchy, or,
shortly thereafter, the new rules centralizing
power in the office of president.13
Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, gradually
abandoned the former’s subservience to Western
interests, and was thereby perceived as a
menace. His reelection in 2012, although surely
less corrupt than Yeltsin’s in 1996, was
castigated in the U.S. media. The lead Times
article on May 5, 2012, featured “a slap in the
face” from Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe observers, claims of no
real competition, and “thousands of
antigovernment protesters gathered in Moscow
square to chant ‘Russia without Putin.'”14
There had been no “challenges to legitimacy”
reported in the Times after Yeltsin’s
tainted victory in 1996.
The
demonization of Putin escalated with the Ukraine
crisis of 2014 and subsequent Kiev warfare in
Eastern Ukraine, Russian support of the East
Ukraine resistance, and the Crimean referendum
and absorption of Crimea by Russia. This was all
declared “aggression” by the United States and
its allies and clients, and sanctions were
imposed on Russia, and a major U.S.-NATO
military buildup was initiated on Russia’s
borders. Tensions mounted further with the
shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
over southeastern Ukraine—promptly, but almost
surely falsely, blamed on the “pro-Russian”
rebels and Russia itself.15
Anti-Russian hostilities were further inflamed
by the country’s escalated intervention in Syria
from 2015 on, in support of Bashar al-Assad and
against rebel forces that had come to be
dominated by ISIS and al-Nusra, an offshoot of
al-Qaeda. The United States and its NATO and
Middle East allies had been committing
aggression against Syria, in de facto alliance
with al-Nusra and other extremist Islamic
factions, for several years. Russian
intervention turned the tide, frustrating the
U.S. and Saudi goal of regime change against
Assad, and weakening tacit U.S. allies.
The
Times has covered these developments with
unstinting apologetics—for the February 2014
coup in Kiev—which it has never labeled as such,
for the U.S. role in the overthrow of the
elected government of Victor Yanukovych, and
with anger and horror at the Crimea referendum
and Russian absorption, which it never allows
might be a defensive response to the Kiev coup.
Its calls for punishment for the casualty-free
Russian “aggression” in Crimea is in marked
contrast to its apologetics for the million-plus
casualties caused by U.S. aggression “of choice”
(not defensive) in Iraq from March 2003 on. The
paper’s editors and columnists condemn Putin’s
disregard for international law, while exempting
their own country from criticism for its
repeated violations of that same law.16
In the Times‘s reporting and opinion
columns Russia is regularly assailed as
expansionist and threatening its neighbors, but
virtually no mention is made of NATO’s expansion
up to the Russian borders and
first-strike-threat placement of anti-missile
weapons in Eastern Europe—the latter earlier
claimed to be in response to a missile threat
from Iran! Analyses by political scientist John
Mearsheimer and Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen
that noted this NATO advance were excluded from
the opinion pages of the Times.17
In contrast, a member of the Russian band Pussy
Riot, Maria Alyokhina, was given op-ed space to
denounce Putin and Russia, and the punk rock
group was granted a meeting with the Times
editorial board.18
Between January 1 and March 31, 2014, the paper
ran twenty-three articles featuring Pussy Riot
and its alleged significance as a symbol of
Russian limits on free speech. Pussy Riot had
disrupted a church service in Moscow and only
stopped after police intervened, at the request
of church authorities. A two-year prison
sentence followed. Meanwhile, in February 2014,
eighty-four-year-old nun Sister Megan Rice was
sentenced to four years in prison for having
entered a U.S. nuclear weapons site in July 2012
and carried out a symbolic protest. The Times
gave this news a tiny mention in its National
Briefing section, under the title “Tennessee Nun
is Sentenced for Peace Protest.” No op-ed
columns or meeting with the Times board
for Rice. There are worthy and unworthy
protesters, just as there are victims.
In Syria, with Russian help, Assad’s army and
allied militias were able to dislodge the rebels
from Aleppo, to the dismay of Washington and the
mainstream media. It has been enlightening to
see the alarm expressed over civilian casualties
in Aleppo, with accompanying photographs of
forsaken children and stories of civilian
suffering and deprivation. The Times‘s
focus on those civilians and children and its
indignation at Putin-Assad inhumanity stands in
sharp contrast with their virtual silence on
massive civilian casualties in Fallujah in 2004
and beyond, and more recently in rebel-held
areas of Syria, and in the Iraqi city of Mosul,
under U.S. and allied attack.19
The differential treatment of worthy and
unworthy victims has been in full force in
coverage of Syria.
A
further phase of intensifying Russophobia may be
dated from the October 2016 presidential
debates, in which Hillary Clinton declared that
Donald Trump would be a Putin “puppet” as
president, a theme her campaign began to stress.
This emphasis only increased after the election,
with the help of the media and intelligence
services, as the Clinton camp sought to explain
their electoral loss, maintain party control,
and possibly even have the election results
overturned in the courts or electoral college by
attributing Trump’s victory to Russian
interference.
A major
impetus for the Putin connection came with the
January 2017 release of a report by the Office
of Director of National Intelligence (DNI),
Background of Assessing Russian Activities and
Intention in Recent US Elections. More than
half of this short document is devoted to the
Russian-sponsored RT news network, which the
report treats as an illegitimate propaganda
source. The organization is allegedly part of
Russia’s “influence campaign…[that] aspired to
help President-elect Trump’s chances of victory
when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton
and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to the
President-elect.” No semblance of proof is
offered that there was any planned “campaign,”
rather than an ongoing expression of opinion and
news judgments. The same standards used to
identify a Russian “influence campaign” could be
applied with equal force to U.S. media and Radio
Free Europe’s treatment of any Russian
election—and of course, the U.S. intervention in
the 1996 Russian election was overt, direct, and
went far beyond any covert “influence campaign.”
No
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Grants
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Media
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Regarding more direct Russian intervention in
the U.S. election, the DNI authors concede the
absence of “full supporting evidence,” but in
fact provide no supporting evidence at all—only
speculative assertions, assumptions, and
guesses. “We assess that…Putin ordered an
influence campaign in 2015,” they write,
designed to defeat Mrs. Clinton, and “to
undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic
process,” but provide no proof of any such
order. The report also contains no evidence that
Russia hacked the communications of the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) or the
emails of Clinton and former Clinton campaign
manager John Podesta, or that it gave hacked
information to WikiLeaks. Julian Assange and
former British diplomat Craig Murray have
repeatedly claimed that these sources were
leaked by local insiders, not hacked from
outside. Veteran intelligence experts William
Binney and Ray McGovern likewise contend that
the WikiLeaks evidence was leaked, not hacked.20
It is also notable that of the three
intelligence agencies who signed the DNI
document, the National Security Agency—the
agency most likely to have proof of Russian
hacking and its transmission to WikiLeaks, as
well as of any “orders” from Putin—only
expressed “moderate confidence” in its findings.
But as with the Reds ruling Guatemala, the
Soviets outpacing U.S. missile capabilities, or
the KGB plotting to assassinate the pope, the
Times has taken the Russian hacking story as
established fact, despite the absence of hard
evidence. Times reporter David Sanger
refers to the report’s “damning and surprisingly
detailed account of Russia’s efforts to
undermine the American electoral system,” only
to then acknowledge that the published report
“contains no information about how the agencies
had …come to their conclusions.”21
The report itself includes the astonishing
statement that “Judgments are not intended to
imply that we have proof that shows something to
be a fact.” Furthermore, if the report was based
on “intercepts of conversations” as well as on
hacked computer data, as Sanger and the DNI
claim, why has the DNI failed to quote a single
conversation showing Putin’s alleged orders and
plans?
The Times has never cited or given op-ed
space to William Binney, Ray McGovern, or Craig
Murray, leading dissident authorities on hacking
technology, methodology, and the specifics of
the DNC hacks. But room was found for Louise
Mensch’s op-ed “What to Ask about Russian
Hacking.” Mensch is a notorious conspiracy
theorist with no relevant technical background,
described by writers Nathan Robinson and Alex
Nichols as best-known for “spending most of her
time on Twitter issuing frenzied denunciations
of imagined armies of online ‘Putinbots,'”
making her “one of the least credible people on
the internet.”22
But she is published in the Times
because, in contrast with the informed and
credible Binney and Murray, she follows the
party line, taking Russian hacking of the DNC as
a premise.
The
CIA’s brazen intervention in the electoral
process in 2016 and 2017 broke new ground in the
agency’s politicization. Former CIA head Michael
Morell announced in an August 2016 op-ed in the
Times: “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m
Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” and former CIA boss
Michael Hayden published an op-ed in the
Washington Post just days before the
election, entitled “Former CIA Chief: Trump is
Russia’s Useful Fool.” Morell had yet another
op-ed in the Times on January 6, now
openly assailing the new president. These
attacks were unrelievedly insulting to Trump and
laudatory to Clinton, even portraying Trump as a
traitor; they also made clear that Clinton’s
more pugnacious stance toward Syria and Russia
was preferable by far to Trump’s leanings toward
negotiation and cooperation with Russia.
This was also true of the scandal surrounding
former Trump Defense Intelligence nominee
Michael Flynn’s telephone call with the Russian
ambassador, which may have included a discussion
of the incoming administration’s policy actions.
The political possibilities of this interaction
were quickly grasped by outgoing Obama
officials, security personnel, and the
mainstream media, with the FBI interrogating
Flynn and with widespread expressions of horror
at Flynn’s action, which could have allegedly
exposed him to Russian blackmail. But such
pre-inauguration meetings with Russian diplomats
have been a “common practice” according to Jack
Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under
Reagan and Bush, and Matlock had personally
arranged such a meeting for Jimmy Carter.23
Obama’s own ambassador to the country, Michael
McFaul, admitted visiting Moscow for talks with
officials in 2008, even before the election.
Daniel Lazare has made a good case not only that
the illegality and blackmail threat are
implausible, but that the FBI’s interrogation of
Flynn reeks of entrapment. “Yet anti-Trump
liberals are trying to convince the public that
it’s all ‘worse than Watergate.'”24
The political point of the DNI report thus seems
to have been, at minimum, to tie the Trump
administration’s hands in its dealings with
Russia. Some analysts outside the mainstream
have argued that we may have been witnessing an
incipient spy or palace coup that fell short,
but still had the desired effect of weakening
the new administration.25
The Times has not offered a word of
criticism of this politicization and
intervention in the election process by
intelligence agencies, and in fact the editors
have been working with them and the Democratic
Party as a loose-knit team in a distinctly un-
and anti-democratic program designed to
undermine or reverse the results of the 2016
election, on the pretext of alleged foreign
electoral interference.
The
Times and the mainstream media in general
have also barely mentioned the awkward fact that
the allegedly hacked disclosures of the DNC and
Clinton and Podesta emails disclosed uncontested
facts about real electoral manipulations on
behalf of the Clinton campaign, facts that the
public had a right to know and that might well
have affected the election results. The focus on
the evidence-free claims of a Russian hacking
intrusion have helped divert attention from the
real electoral abuses disclosed by the WikiLeaks
material. Here again, official and mainstream
media fake news helped bury real news.
Another arrow in the Russophobia quiver was a
private intelligence “dossier” compiled by
Christopher Steele, a former British
intelligence agent working for Orbis Business
Intelligence, a private firm hired by the DNC to
dig up dirt on Trump. Steele’s first report,
delivered in June 2016, made numerous serious
accusations against Trump, most notably that
Trump had been caught in a sexual escapade in
Moscow, that his political advance had been
supported by the Kremlin for at least five
years, under Putin’s direction, in order to sow
discord within the U.S. political establishment
and disrupt the Western alliance. This document
was based on alleged conversations by Steele
with distant (Russian) officials: that is,
strictly on hearsay evidence, whose assertions,
where verifiable, are sometimes erroneous.26
But it said just what the Democrats, the
mainstream media, and the CIA wanted to hear,
and intelligence officials accordingly declared
the author “credible,” and the media lapped it
up. The Times hedged somewhat on its own
cooperation in this tawdry campaign by calling
the report “unverified,” but nevertheless
reported its claims.27
The
Steele dossier also became a central part of the
investigation and hearings on “Russia-gate” held
by the House Intelligence Committee starting in
March 2017, led by Democratic Representative
Adam Schiff. While basing his opening statement
on the hearsay-laden dossier, Schiff expressed
no interest in establishing who funded the
Steele effort, the identity and exact status of
the Russian officials quoted, or how much they
were paid. Apparently talking to Russians with a
design of influencing an American presidential
election is perfectly acceptable if the
candidate supported by this intrusion is
anti-Russian!
The Times has played a major role in this
latest wave of Russophobia, reminiscent of its
1917–20 performance in which, as Lippmann and
Merz noted in 1920, “boundless credulity, and an
untiring readiness to be gulled” characterized
the news-making process. While quoting the CIA’s
admission that it had no hard evidence, relying
instead on “circumstantial evidence” and
“capabilities,” the Times was happy to
describe these capabilities at great length and
to imply that they proved something.28
Editorials and news articles have worked
uniformly on the false supposition that Russian
hacking was proved, and that the Russians had
given these data to WikiLeaks, also unproven and
strenuously denied by Assange and Murray.
The Times has run neck-and-neck with the
Washington Post in stirring up fears of
the Russian information war and illicit
involvement with Trump. The Times now
easily conflates fake news with any criticism of
established institutions, as in Mark Scott and
Melissa Eddy’s “Europe Combats a New Foe of
Political Stability: Fake News,” February 20,
2017.29
But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity
with which the paper’s regular columnists accept
as a given the CIA’s assessment of the Russian
hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the
possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin
puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional
and “non-partisan” investigation of these
claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line
has extended widely in the liberal media. Both
the Times and Washington Post have
lent tacit support to the idea that this “fake
news” threat needs to be curbed, possibly by
some form of voluntary media-organized
censorship or government intervention that would
at least expose the fakery.
The most remarkable media episode in this
anti-influence-campaign was the Post‘s
piece by Craig Timberg, “Russian propaganda
effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during
election, experts say,” which featured a report
by a group of anonymous “experts” entity called
PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two
hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were
“routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” While
smearing these websites, many of them
independent news outlets whose only shared trait
was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign
policy, the “experts” refused to identify
themselves, allegedly out of fear of being
“targeted by legions of skilled hackers.” As
journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, “You want to
blacklist hundreds of people, but you won’t put
your name to your claims? Take a hike.”30
But the Post welcomed and promoted this
McCarthyite effort, which might well be a
product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare.
(And these entities are themselves well-funded
and heavily into the propaganda business.)
On
December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the
Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and
Propaganda Act, which will supposedly allow the
United States to more effectively combat foreign
(namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and
disinformation. It will encourage more
government counter-propaganda efforts, and
provide funding to non-government entities to
help in this enterprise. It is clearly a
follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and
propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing
of two hundred tools of Moscow featured in the
Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will
qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its
list.) Liberals have been quiet on this new
threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly
influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake
news and propaganda. But they may yet take
notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of
his successors puts it to work on their own
notions of fake news and propaganda.
The success of the war party’s campaign to
contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions
with Russia was made dramatically clear in the
Trump administration’s speedy bombing response
to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons
deaths. The Times and other mainstream
media editors and journalists greeted this
aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm,
and once again did not require evidence of
Assad’s guilt beyond their government’s claims.31
The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but
served the rebels well.
But the mainstream media never ask cui bono?
in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge
against Assad, which brought the United States
to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in
Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation,
and some authorities believe the current case is
equally problematic.32
Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and
illegally), dealing a blow to any further
rapprochement between the United States and
Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading
Democrats, and the rest of the war party had won
an important skirmish in the struggle over
permanent war.
Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of
finance at the Wharton School of Business of the
University of Pennsylvaniaand a media analyst
with a specialty in corporate and regulatory
issues as well as political economy. He also
teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at
the University of Pennsylvania. He is perhaps
best known for developing the propaganda model
of media criticism with Noam Chomsky.
Notes
-
Noam
Chomsky and Edward S. Herman,Manufacturing
Consent (New York: Pantheon, 2008),
chapter 2.
-
Walter
Lippmann and Charles Merz,A
Test of the News (New York: New
Republic, 1920).
-
On the
Grand Area framework, see Noam Chomsky, “The
New Framework of Order,” inOn
Power and Ideology (Boston: South
End, 1987).
-
Edward
S. Herman, “Returning Guatemala to the
Fold,” in Gary Rawnsley, ed.,Cold
War Propaganda in the 1950s (London:
Macmillan, 1999).
-
Ronald
Schneider,Communism
in Guatemala, 1944–1954 (New York:
Praeger, 1959), 41, 196–97, 294.
-
Editorial Board, “The
Guatemala Incident,”New
York Times, April 8, 1950.
-
Elisabeth Malkin, “An
Apology for a Guatemalan Coup, 57 Years
Later,”New
York Times, October 11, 2011.
-
Harrison Salisbury,Without
Fear or Favor (New York: Times Books,
1980), 486.
-
Richard Du Boff and Edward Herman,America’s
Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception
(Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs, 1966).
-
See
Chomsky and Herman,Manufacturing
Consent, chapter 6.
-
Editorial Board, “A
Victory for Russian Democracy,”New
York Times, July 4, 1996.
-
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The
Dismantling of Yugoslavia,”Monthly
Review 59, no. 5 (October 2007);
Herman and Peterson, “Poor
Marlise: Her Old Allies Are Now Attacking
the Tribunal and Even Portraying the Serbs
as Victims,”
ZNet, October 30, 2008, http://zcomm.org.
-
Stephen F. Cohen,Failed
Crusade: America and the Tragedy of
Post-Communist Russia (New York:
Norton, 2000).
-
Ellen Barry and Michael Schwartz, “After
Election, Putin Faces Challenges to
Legitimacy,”New
York Times, March 5, 2012.
-
Robert Parry, “Troubling
Gaps in the New MH-17 Report,”
Consortium News, September 28, 2016, http://consortiumnews.com.
-
Paul Krugman says, “Mr. Putin is someone who
doesn’t worry about little things like
international law” (“The
Siberian Candidate,”New
York Times, July 22, 2016)—implying,
falsely, that U.S. leaders do “worry about”
such things.
-
A version of Mearsheimer’s article appeared
as “Why
the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”Foreign
Affairs, September 10, 2014. The
paper likewise rejected Stephen Cohen’s 2012
article “The Demonization of Putin.”
-
“Sochi
Under Siege,”New
York Times, February 21, 2014.
-
Michael Kimmelman, “Aleppo’s
Faces Beckon to Us, To Little Avail,”New
York Times, December 15, 2016. Above
this front-page article were four
photographs of dead or injured children, the
most prominent one in Syria. The
accompanying editorial, “Aleppo’s
Destroyers: Assad, Putin, Iran,”
omits some key actors and killers. See also
Rick Sterling, “How
US Propaganda Plays in Syrian War,”
Consortium News, September 23, 2016.
-
William Binney and Ray McGovern, “The
Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking,’”
Consortium News, January 6, 2017.
-
David Sanger, “Putin
Ordered ‘Influence Campaign’ Aimed at U.S.
Election, Report Says,”New
York Times, January 6, 2017.
-
Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Nichols, “What
Constitutes Reasonable Mainstream Opinion,”Current
Affairs, March 22, 2017.
-
Jack Matlock, “Contacts
with Russian Embassy,”
Jack Matlock blog, March 4, 2017, http://jackmatlock.com.
-
Daniel Lazare, “Democrats,
Liberals, Catch McCarthyistic Fever,”
Consortium News, February 17, 2017.
-
Robert Parry, “A
Spy Coup in America?”
Consortium News, December 18, 2016; Andre
Damon, “Democratic
Party Floats Proposal for a Palace Coup,”
Information Clearing House,” March 23, 2017,
http://informationclearinghouse.info.
-
Robert Parry, “The
Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate,”
Consortium News, March 29, 2017.
-
Scott Shane et al., “How
a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a
Crisis for Donald Trump,”New
York Times, January 11, 2017.
-
Matt Fegenheimer and Scott Shane,
“Bipartisan Voices Back U.S. Agencies On
Russia Hacking,”New
York Times, January 6, 2017; Michael
Shear and David Sanger, “Putin
Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid
Trump, Report Finds,”New
York Times,January 7, 2017; Andrew
Kramer, “How
Russia Recruited Elite Hackers for Its
Cyberwar,”New
York Times, December 30, 2016.
-
Robert Parry, “NYT’s
Fake News about Fake News,”
Consortium News, February 22, 2017.
-
Matt Taibbi, “The
‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is
Shameful and Disgusting,”Rolling
Stone, November 28, 2016.
-
Adam Johnson, “Out
of 47 Media Editorials on Trump’s Syria
Strikes, Only One Opposed,”
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April
11, 2017, http://fair.org.
-
Scott Ritter, “Wag
the Dog—How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump and
The American Media,”
Huffington Post, April 9, 2017; James Carden,
“The
Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria: Is There a
Place for Skepticism?”Nation,
April 11, 2017.
This article was first published by
Monthly Review
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.