Insidiocracy: Russiagate, Corporate Media & Losing My Religion – Part One

NinaIllingworth January 23, 2019November 17, 2022 Alfa Bank, Ango-American School of Moscow, Anonymous, AP, Arizona, Associated Press, Bellingcat, Ben Jacobs, Bernie Sanders, Bill Moran, CIA, Clinton campaign, CNN, corporate media, Craig Timberg, David Frum, DCLeaks, debunking, Democratic Party, dissent, DNS, Donald Trump, Doug Johnson Hatlem, Ellen Nakashima, Essays, Fake News, Fantastic Lies, FBI, Franklin Foer, Giant Russia Theory, Glenn Greenwald, GOP, Guccifer 2, hacked voting registrtaions, hacking, hacktivism, Hillary Clinton, hoax, Illinois, Impeach Trump, John Podesta, Joy Reid, Julian Assange, Kurt Eichenwald, Malcolm Nance, Manchurian Candidate, Matt Taibbi, McCarthyism, Media, Mueller investigation, Naked Capitalism, new cold war, new McCarthyism, News, Newsweek, Nina Illingworth, Podesta Emails, Politics, President Obama, Prop or Not, Putin, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, retractions, Robert Mueller, Rolling Stone, RT, Russia, Russiagate, Russian bots, Russian Hacking, Russian trolls, shady, Sid Blumenthal, Six Things I Think, skepticism, Slate, Sputnik, The Guardian, The Intercept, treason, Trump, Trump hotels, Trump-Russia, Truthdig, Twitter, US media, US politics, US sanctions against Russia, Vladimir Putin, walk backs, Washington Post, Wikileaks

Editor’s Note: When I sat down to write this article, I began by compiling a list of all the times mainstream corporate news outlets had been forced to retract or effectively neuter a “bombshell” story about Russia or the ongoing (and surprisingly convenient for the Democratic half of our elite neoliberal establishment) Cold War conspiracy spy novel that is Russiagate.

Working from my notes and memory, I was able to piece together about twenty examples; feeling pleased with myself, I immediately dove into the task of composing this post. About halfway through however, I decided to search the internet for any examples I might have missed. That was when I came across the work Doug Johnson Hatlem (@djjohnso) who had compiled a whopping thirty-seven examples of media retractions into a single Twitter thread. While I trust that the content below is sufficiently distinct from this thread to represent a unique work, I would be remiss if I did not offer Doug a hat-tip and note that some not-insignificant portion of this article is an expansion of his posts on Twitter.

Finally, if you haven’t been following my previous writing on “Russiagate” and you’re wondering where I stand on swine emperor Trump, Vladdy Putin and the pro-Pig empire corporate media, please read this December 2017 recap; absolutely nothing about my opinion has changed in the time since then and I’m going to respond poorly to accusations of partisanship when I have repeatedly written that Herr Donald is a fascist, a rapist, a crook, a warmonger and a liar – what he isn’t, is a Russian intelligence asset, and if a New Cold War with Russia and its allies is the price of admission for impeaching Trump, I’m not interested.

A Method of Mendacity

It’s nine-thirty on a Saturday night and for the first time in a long while, I care enough to be furious about the mainstream media’s openly dishonest coverage of yet another largely fictional story in the endless and excruciating “Russiagate” saga.

The latest “bombshell” Trump-Russia revelation from Buzzfeed News had predictably fallen completely apart when special counsel Robert Mueller took the rare step of publicly disputing the accuracy of the anonymously-sourced report. This isn’t what’s infuriating me however; at this point a major media outlet having to retract (or inexplicably refusing to retract) a disputed, sensationalized anti-Russia story with terrifying implications for American national security and foreign policy because it’s utter fucking bupkis is no longer exceptional, it just means it’s Friday. No, what’s got me barking profanities at my computer screen is watching the entire Russiagate griftosphere, both professional and self-appointed, twist and distort the truth to salvage their broken “smoking gun” takes rushed out in the wake of the Buzzfeed story, even though Mueller’s office was adamant that none of the allegations or statements detailed were true.

How did we get here and at what point does the evidence that this is all a manufactured narrative become too voluminous to ignore?

Tale of the Tape

Trump gets smoother ride than Clinton in Russian media – written in July 2016 and well before I’d even become aware of what would eventually be known as “Russiagate,” I must confess that I’d completely forgotten about this Associated Press gaffe until reading Twitter user Doug Johnson Hatlem’s excellent compilation thread. The long and short of the story is that the AP originally stated that the RT satellite television network (formerly Russia Today) was part of the Rossiya Segodnya state media complex. This is inaccurate and the Associated Press was forced to issue a correction five days after publishing the initial story. The truth is that while RT does receive funding from the Russian government, it is a stand alone entity and numerous journalists and presenters who work with RT have reported that Russia exerts no control over their content. While on the surface that might not seem like a big deal, in light of the fact that fairly absurd accusations of state-sponsored election rigging aided by RT news coverage were used to attack and discredit American journalists working for the network and eventually pressure multiple cable providers to stop carrying the station altogether, it’s safe to say this ridiculously careless mistake may have had big consequences. The Associated Press has since deleted the story entirely.

Russian hackers targeted Arizona election system – this August 29th, 2016 story by Ellen Nakashima over at the Washington Post is actually the most balanced version of a “Breaking News” item that dominated US media coverage for several full days. Unlike many of her less critical colleagues, Nakashima is careful to de-fang the story by pointing out that “the hackers had not compromised the state system or even any county system. They had, however, stolen the username and password of a single election official in Gila County.” What makes this whole saga even more amusing however is that even this single incident has absolutely nothing to do with Russia; as Doug Hatlem notes, hactivist group Anonymous had already announced months before that they had entered the system to do a vulnerability scan as part of an investigation to see whether or not Bernie Sanders voters had been screwed in the Arizona primary – spoiler; they were, but it’s unclear if the seemingly targeted de-registration of likely Bernie supporters was large enough to change any outcomes. Nevertheless, like most of the outrageous claims about Russian interference in western politics, even after being walked back or debunked, the story never seems to truly die.

Dear Vladimir Putin, I Am Not Sidney Blumenthal – this objectively unhinged (and now deleted) screed from noted hack, general creeper and squid porn affictionato Kurt Eichenwald, perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of mainstream media “Russiagate” hysteria. Without spending too much time reviewing a now-thoroughly discredited Newsweek story, Eichenwald seized on a simple misattribution by then-Sputnik editor Bill Moran (which was repeated once, by Donald Trump) to claim that Wikileaks had altered documents and that Trump was obviously colluding with Vladimir Putin. Naturally, this story promptly went viral as the intersection of Sputnik (which actually is part of the Rossiya Segodnya state media complex) and the Trump campaign proved irresistible to pro-Clinton hacks desperate to discredit the one-hundred percent real Podesta emails and inside a news environment already swirling with highly-speculative claims of Russian election rigging. The problem as it turns out is that Eichenwald was almost certainly wrong about Trump getting the quote from Sputnik; which naturally didn’t stop Kurt from doubling down on his story while repeatedly threatening and publicly smearing Moran – an activity which eventually caused Newsweek to reach an undisclosed settlement with the former Sputnik editor. In what we can only hope is related news, Kurt Eichenwald no longer writes for Newsweek.

Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? – On October 31st, 2016, this explosive (and once again, highly speculative) Slate piece by Franklin Foer burst into the national discourse with allegations of a secret “digital hotline” connecting the Trump campaign and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Unfortunately for Foer however, the story began to unravel in a matter of hours. First came news that the FBI had spent weeks studying the DNS data the story was based on and concluded there was no clear evidence the connection between these two servers meant anything at all. Soon afterward, stories in Vox and the Intercept began to expose giant holes in Foer’s thesis; the connection isn’t secret or exclusive, Trump doesn’t even control the mail server contacting Alpha Bank and it’s almost certain that spam advertisements from Trump hotels to the bank are responsible for the DNS look-ups Foer has incorrectly identified of evidence of a secret back-channel between Trump and Vladdy Putin. This isn’t the only outright error Foer makes in the piece either, there are several; for example the author claims that contact between the two servers “appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States” but simply put, it didn’t. All of this quickly forced the author to release a follow-up with so many qualifications and subjective (but implausible) theories that it all but rendered the original piece pathetically toothless. Naturally, this hasn’t stopped McCarthyite liberals in the media from resurrecting the accusation recently, despite the fact that virtually nothing has changed and there remains no evidence that any of this means anything at all.

The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting – without question, the openly absurdist “Prop Or Not” story represents one of the most craven, repugnant and insulting fabrications sold to the public during the entire “Russiagate” saga. In this November 28th, 2016 piece at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi unpacks a disturbing (and now edited) November 24th WaPo article by Craig Timberg (original here) that primarily serves as a vehicle for an extremely shady, anonymous online group of “researchers” to blacklist and smear essentially everyone who doesn’t agree with the mainstream neoliberal consensus – not just on Russiagate, but on literally everything; at publication, the list the Post linked to through Prop or Not consisted of over “200 alternative news outlets” and included “popular sites like Truthdig and Naked Capitalism.” The obvious and open shades of McCarthyism rightfully enraged Taibbi, as well as the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald who wrote a very similar piece on November 26th, 2016, with the anti-survelliance writer pointing out that that the piece “was one of the most widely circulated political news articles on social media over the last 48 hours, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of U.S. journalists and pundits with large platforms hailing it as an earth-shattering exposé. It was the most-read piece on the entire Post website on Friday after it was published.” Despite the fact that the Washington Post’s own correction essentially renders the entire story a bust however, the paper has refused to this day to retract or take down this absurd, McCarthyite propaganda article designed to present all dissent as treason.

A Clinton Fan Manufactured Fake News That MSNBC Personalities Spread to Discredit WikiLeaks Docs – while this piece is not a retraction per se, any study of mainstream media deceptions during the “Russiagate” saga would be incomplete without including this December 9th, 2016 savage and thorough debunking of an early October lie about Russia propagated by people associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and amplified by numerous high-profile mainstream liberal media allies on Twitter. As author Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept details, without any evidence whatsoever Clinton campaign officials strongly insinuated that emails from campaign manager John Podesta, released by Wikileaks were “doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored.” This bald-faced lie was then confirmed by Nance, a former naval intelligence officer who should know better and yet, inexplicably remains a credible television pundit, before being pushed out as election damage control over the next few weeks by various mainstream news personalities. Frankly, this should actually count as two lies because forgery claims were also tied into a months-long campaign in the mainstream media to purposely conflated Wikileaks (who has literally never released a fake document in its entire twelve-plus years of existence) and far less credible anonymous propaganda operations like DCLeaks and Guccifer 2. To this day, nobody who accused Wikileaks of falsifying emails in the Podesta release has ever issued a correction of any kind, which is a really curious situation considering the fact that we’re talking about an allegation that would represent a huge national security and international relations issue – if it had ever been true.

Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview – Although the Guardian has been one of the few mainstream, ostensibly “liberal” corporate media outlets willing to entertain some skepticism towards the more outlandish accusations in the “Russiagate” saga, the paper’s desperate (and ethically questionable) quest to distance itself from Julian Assange and the UK’s own, ongoing propaganda efforts to manufacture a New Cold War with Russia, often produces some “interesting examples of combining fiction writing with journalism” – to put it lightly. All anyone really needs to know about this December 24th, 2016 Ben Jacobs interview with Asssange can be found in the corrections at the bottom of the article, which states: “this article was amended on 29 December 2016 to remove a sentence in which it was asserted that Assange “has long had a close relationship with the Putin regime”. A sentence was also amended which paraphrased the interview, suggesting Assange said “there was no need for Wikileaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there”. It has been amended to more directly describe the question Assange was responding to when he spoke of Russia’s “many vibrant publications.” Once again, this pretty much invalidates the author’s entire framing of the interview and the article should almost certainly just be taken down altogether. More disturbing however is that the Guardian apparently spent five days telling its readers that Assange did have a completely fictional “close relationship with the Putin regime” and was actively avoiding the publication of Russian leaks. Neither of which are, or ever were, true in any sense of the word.

Wrong Again: Russia’s Anglo-American School Not Closing To Spite Obama – another story that fell down my memory hole until I read Hatlem’s media lies, mistakes and retractions thread, this story is pretty straightforward compared with the others in this section. On December 29th, 2016, CNN reported in a tweet that “a US official says Russian authorities ordered the Anglo-American School of Moscow to close as retaliation for US sanctions.” This was then repeated in another story on the website, before being picked up by Politico and Radio Free Europe – once again however, this accusation, sourced to an anonymous US official, is simply not true. While that might not seem like a very big deal, it’s important to remember that this non-event was portrayed as part of an escalating diplomatic row between the US and Russia over sanctions imposed by Obama due to Russian still unproven “election hacking” – thus it is quite strange that despite the obvious national security implications of the story, no retractions have been issued and all of the posts falsely claiming the school would be closed in retaliation, remain available online.