Greenwald on Russia Coverage

CNN is hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, U.S. major media outlets have published claims about The Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false – always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources which these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.

Several of the most humiliating of these episodes have come from the Washington Post. On December 30, the paper published a blockbuster, frightening scoop that immediately and predictably went viral and generated massive traffic. Russian hackers, the paper claimed based on anonymous sources, had hacked into the “U.S. electricity grid” through a Vermont utility.

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That, in turn, led MSNBC journalists, and various Democratic officials, to instantly sound the alarm that Putin was trying to deny Americans heat during the winter.

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Literally every facet of that story turned out to be false.

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Less than a month before its electric grid farce, the Post published a blockbuster story – largely based on a blacklist issued by a brand new, entirely anonymous group – featuring the shocking assertion that stories planted or promoted by Russia’s “disinformation campaign” were viewed more than 213 million times.

That story fell apart almost immediately.

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A few weeks later, C-SPAN made big news when it announced that it had been hacked and its network had been taken over by the state-owned Russian outlet RT.

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That, too, turned out to be totally baseless, and C-SPAN was forced to renounce the claim.

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In the same time period – December, 2016 – the Guardian published a story by reporter Ben Jacobs claiming that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, had a “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.” That claim, along with several others in the story, was fabricated.

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Perhaps the most significant Russia falsehood came from CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of its email servers [...] accusing Russian hackers of nefarious activities involving the Ukrainian army, which numerous outlets including (of course) the Washington Post, uncritically hyped.

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Yet that story also fell apart. In March, the firm “revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign” after several experts questioned its claims, and “CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.”

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What is most notable about these episodes is that they all go in the same direction: hyping and exaggerating the threat posed by the Kremlin. All media outlets will make mistakes; that is to be expected. But when all of the “mistakes” are devoted to the same rhetorical theme, and when they all end up advancing the same narrative goal, it seems clear that they are not the by-product of mere garden-variety journalistic mistakes.

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[B]latantly inane anti-Trump conspiracists and Russia conspiracies now command such a large audience: because there is a voracious appetite among anti-Trump internet and cable news viewers for stories, no matter how false, that they want to believe are true (and, conversely, expressing any skepticism about such stories results in widespread accusations that one is a Kremlin sympathizer or outright agent).

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In sum, anything is fair game when it comes to circulating accusations about official U.S. adversaries, no matter how baseless, and Russia currently occupies that role.

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The importance of this journalistic malfeasance when it comes to Russia, a nuclear-armed power, cannot be overstated. This is the story that has dominated U.S. politics for more than a year. Ratcheting up tensions between these two historically hostile powers is incredibly inflammatory and dangerous.

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And that’s all independent of how journalistic recklessness fuels, and gives credence to, the Trump administration’s campaign to discredit journalism generally.

  Intercept

It might be worth pointing out here that when you read any material such as this blog post that relies on other reporting, you would be well adivsed to read the articles quoted. Mistakes can also be made in rettelling and interpreting reports. Or even just in quoting a portion of something that may look different when you read the entire article. There have been plenty of times when I went to the source of someone's post to find it didn't back up the post's claims.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

A senior producer at CNN is caught on a hidden camera admitting their Russia coverage is "mostly bullshit" "because it's ratings."