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

NinaIllingworth January 29, 2019November 17, 2022 17 Intelligence Agencies lie, 2008 Financial Crisis, Abby Martin, Alternet, Anthony Scaramucci, anti-Russian propaganda, AP, Associated Press, Attack on Pearl Harbor, austerity, Axios, Bill Clinton, Brexit, Brian Stetler, broken bombshell, Carol Lee, Chuck Grassley, CIA, CIA mop up man, CNN, corporate media, cyberattack, debunking, debunking Russiagate, Democratic Party, Department of Justice, dissent, DNC email hack, DoJ, Donald Trump, Donations, donors, Doug Johnson Hatlem, edits and corrections, Edward Herman, Erik Wemple, Essays, Ewen MacAskill, Fantastic Lies, fascism, FBI, Ferguson protests, foreign policy, Giant Russia Theory, Glenn Greenwald, GOP, hacking, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, hit piece, Impeach Trump, Iran, Iraq war lies, James Clapper, James Comey, Jason Zinoman, John Brennan, John Pilger, Ken Dilanian, kompromat, Lee Camp, liberal mainstream media, Libya, Manchurian Candidate, manufacturing consent, Mark Ames, Marshall McLuhan, Matt Taibbi, McCarthyism, Media, Megyn Kelly, Michael Parenti, Mueller investigation, Naked Capitalism, Natalia Veselnitskaya, NBC, NBC News, new cold war, new McCarthyism, New York Times, News, Nina Illingworth, Noam Chomsky, obstruction of justice, Occupy Wall Street, ODNI, ONDI report, OODS, Paul Manafort, Politics, proxy war, Putin, Rajeev Syal, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, Redacted Tonight, regime change, retractions, RNC, Robert Mueller, Ronald Reagan, Russia, Russia Today, Russiagate, Russiagate grifters, Russian allies, Russian bots, Russian Hacking, Russian trolls, shady, Six Things I Think, skepticism, swine emperor Trump, Talking Points Memo, The Guardian, The Intercept, Trump, Trump Tower meeting, Trump-Russia, Truthdig, Twitter, UK, UK intelligence, US backed coups, US media, US politics, US sanctions against Russia, Vladimir Putin, walk backs, Washington Post, Wikileaks, WMD lies

Editor’s note: this is Part Three in a five part series about Pig Empire corporate media corrections, retractions and walk-backs while covering the objectively unhinged “Russiagate” saga; you can find Part One and Part Two here.

As mentioned previously in this series, this story really isn’t about US swine emperor Donald Trump; a man who I have identified in writing as a fascist, a rapist, a crook, a warmonger and a liar. This series is about the disturbingly large number of misreported, or outright fabricated, stories in US corporate media that relate in some way to Russia. These are stories with terrifying national security and foreign policy implications, released by professional media outlets that should be held to a higher standard of conduct than they have been by a mainstream establishment desperate to avoid responsibility for turning the car keys over to a self-obsessed, moronic fascist. For those of you who are curious about my position on the scandal commonly known as “Russiagate,” I encourage you to read this December 2017 recap; nothing about my opinion has changed in the time since I wrote that piece.

Finally, as I mentioned in Part One, a portion of the research in this article is sourced from the work of Twitter user Doug Johnson Hatlem (@djjohnso) whose recently-published thread of forty plus mainstream media “Russiagate” mistakes added numerous examples to this article that I wouldn’t have remembered on my own.

Mountains of Staggering Bullsh*t

It’s early spring in the mid-1990’s and I’m lying in a hospital bed after reconstructive knee surgery. With nothing to do but wait, I grab one of the books my friends and family have given me for the occasion; that book turns out to be “Manufacturing Consent” by Edward S Hermann and Noam Chomsky. I hate to admit this, even now, but in the moment I don’t actually understand the importance of what I’m reading. Although I recognize and understand the authors’ “propaganda model” as a horrifyingly real concept, right now I’m not all that worried about it. After all, that book was about guys like Kissinger and Reagan; with Bill Clinton already into his second term, the United States doesn’t fight wars anymore – at least not real ones. I am of course absorbing valuable information despite my own naivety; ideas, concepts and arguments that I will eventually augment by reading authors like McLuhan, Pilger and Parenti.

Sadly, I’m going to need it soon enough, when the sky explodes and the levy breaks. The patterns I’m learning to recognize will help me see through the anonymous sources, the lies and retractions surrounding “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction” and again when I’m told Russia hacked the 2016 US presidential election. This knowledge will serve me well when blood-soaked corpse merchants lie us all into two forever wars, the destruction of Libya and at least three US-backed coups over the next couple of decades. These skills are going to get me through the installation of a police state, neo-feudalism and austerity, a bailout, a foreclosure crisis, the coordinated defamation and destruction of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the establishment backlash against the Ferguson protests. These words and this moment will be why I recognize the rise of fascism throughout the West years before the election of Donald Trump.

Most importantly however, there will be times over the next two decades where knowing that someone else knows its all a series of carefully packaged lies, is the only thing that’s going to keep me sane.

Barely.

Tale of the Tape

Putin Interview: Did Russia Interfere in the Election, Collect Info on Trump? – just a little after dinner time on June 4th, 2017, NBC news shook the country with revelations that during an exclusive interview with Vladimir Putin, pinhead Fox news reject, honorary resistance member and soon-to-be ex-NBC contributor Megyn Kelly had tricked the Russian president into revealing that he did, indeed have incriminating material with which it would be possible to blackmail swine emperor Trump. If you’ve been reading along in Part One and Part Two of this series, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that it took literally less than one hour for this latest “Russiagate” zeppelin to burst. NBC promptly issued a “correction” saying that no, Putin had not admitted to having “kompromat” on Herr Donald and indeed, had called the idea “just another load of nonsense.” Okay, well, so what right? It’s not like Putin couldn’t be lying and NBC corrected the story fairly quickly, didn’t they? On the surface, those seem like fair questions but this is the essential problem with the vast majority of “Russiagate” reporting in the western, particularly US media. If NBC’s initial claim had been true, Kelly’s interview may well have been the moment history remembers as the beginning of World War Three. The national security implications of the Russian president openly admitting he had compromising information on the US president would be beyond enormous; particularly in a nation where officials and NatSec observers were already calling some laughably shitty Facebook memes, many of which were released after the 2016 election, literally the same as “the attack on Pearl Harbor.” You simply cannot print something like that, based on a poor translation or misunderstanding; no responsible media organization operating with even a modicum of journalistic integrity would do so – and yet NBC fired that puppy out into the discourse without even blinking, before having to walk it back just under an hour later.

Comey unlikely to judge on obstruction – yet another short-lived “Russiagate bombshell” that I would have completely forgotten about without Doug Hatlem and his magnificent Twitter thread, this June 7th, 2017 piece at CNN initially reported that fired FBI director James Comey would testify under oath that Trump was lying when he said Comey had told him multiple times he was not under investigation by the FBI. A few hours later, Comey then released his prepared remarks which indicated that he would in fact confirm that he had told Trump on three separate occasions that he was not under investigation; confirmations that the former FBI Director has since said he regrets providing. This quickly forced CNN to significantly alter both the article and the headline, leaving behind only a boring shadow of their now thoroughly broken “bombshell” exclusive; a story based once again, entirely on “anonymous sources close to the Mueller investigation.”

A Pack of Excuses and the ’17 Intelligence Agencies’ Falsehood – if you haven’t been living in a cave for the past two years, you have by now already heard the statement that “seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agree Russia was behind the DNC emails hack” – it was reported everywhere in the media, Hillary Clinton repeated the claim during the third presidential debate in 2016, and it was rated as “true” by the respected (by some) “fact-checking” organization Polifact. As this June 8th, 2017 Truthdig piece from the late Robert Parry demonstrates however, the claim is simply not true. Both former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan have testified before U.S. Congress that the report this claim was based on is actually the work of only four agencies – the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and of course the ODNI, which was run by Clapper and ultimately released the underwhelming report on Russian interference in the 2016 election on January 6th, 2017. As Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple notes in his July 17th, 2017 analysis, seventeen is a far more convincing and suggestive number than four, and Wemple rightfully concludes that “the media laundered and recycled a Clinton talking point without too much exploration of the intricacies through which the intelligence community reaches its conclusions.” Although many of the stories in corporate media that led with this specious claim have since been deleted, to my knowledge only the New York Times and the Associated Press ever issued a retraction or correction.

Comey and Trump agree on one thing: fake news – This June 9th, 2017 recap over at Axios is really about the final resolution of two separate stories. On February 14th, 2017, the New York Times printed a front page “Russiagate” blockbuster with the headline “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” As this June 8th, 2017 post from Erik Wemple over at Washington Post reveals however, former FBI Director James Comey himself would testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the story was false, stating “in the main, it was not true.” Ludicrously enough, this lead to the New York Times actually defending the story, even after the former FBI Director had all but completely debunked it. Even setting aside the ridiculousness of the NYT’s position however, this story exemplifies yet another reoccurring problem with mainstream western media’s reporting about Russia since this sad saga began; for five months, virtually every “very serious person” in your newspaper and on your television treated the NYT report as the gospel truth – by the time Comey refuted it, the narrative had already been long baked in; whether that’s a bug, or a feature, probably depends on whether or not you’re invested in a New Cold War with Russia.

Lee Camp: How to Write Propaganda for the NY Times As Demonstrated in an Article About Me – this articulate and extremely detailed, June 13th, 2017 rebuttal by American comedian Lee Camp (featured on Naked Capitalism and Alternet) is a direct response to this June 7th, 2017 New York Times hit piece by Jason Zinoman; a piece clearly designed to discredit both Camp and the network that runs his comedy news program Redacted Tonight, RT (formerly Russia Today.) As Camp thoroughly demonstrates in this must-read analysis, Zinoman’s “reporting” contains no less than fifteen “lies, manipulations, and false implications” in an article that clocks in at just over eleven hundred words. This isn’t just a case of “he said, he said” either, as any clear reading of both articles will reveal; these propaganda distortions include fundamentally misrepresenting Camp’s show, his political beliefs, his work as a comic, falsely associating him with disgraced former Trump NatSec advisor Michael Flynn, quoting a completely discredited source who then falsely smears Redacted Tonight and bizarrely, implying that “two beefy guys speaking in Russian” outside one of Camp’s live shows (who were probably there to see a rap concert) might somehow be relevant. As if the New York Times going completely Page Six on an American comedian with a political humor show on a network nobody watches isn’t alarming enough, this wasn’t the last propaganda attack by a major media outlet on Camp; a few months later NPR got in on the action with a similarly distorted, dishonest and disingenuous smear targeting Camp’s show “Redacted Tonight.” Finally, it should be remembered that both of these attacks against Camp played out against the backdrop of multiple mainstream media hit pieces on prominent left leaning critics, including Matt Taibbi, Mark Ames and as you’ll recall from Part Two, former RT presenter Abby Martin, who was herself repeatedly smeared by, you guessed it – the New York Times.

Cyber-attack on UK parliament: Russia is suspected culprit – once again I find myself indebted to Doug Hatlem and his extremely thorough Twitter thread detailing mainstream media corrections, retractions and debunked bombshells about Russia or anything loosely affiliated with Russia; personally, I had no recollection of this story whatsoever. Despite my ignorance however, this June 25th, 2017 report at The Guardian by Ewen MacAskill and Rajeev Syal that flatly opens by stating “the Russian government is suspected of being behind a cyber-attack on parliament that breached dozens of email accounts belonging to MPs and peers,” remains online. Which is curious to say the least, because this October 14th, 2017 report at The Guardian by Ewen MacAskill states that “Iran is being blamed for a cyber-attack in June on the email accounts of dozens of MPs, according to an unpublished assessment by British intelligence” before noting “initial suspicion for the attack fell on Russia, but this has now been discounted.” Once again, this might not seem like that big of a deal on the surface, but if you’re going to use an anonymous British intelligence agent to leak information blaming an implied state enemy for hacking the email accounts of your elected officials, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you have the right implied state enemy in mind; particularly when you and your allies are already playing nuclear chicken with the wrongly accused party over Brexit and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, or when it’s going to take you almost four months to correct your mistake publicly.

Three journalists leaving CNN after retracted article – this cryptic, even purposely vague June 27th, 2017 update by resident journalist-like-substance Brian Stetler over at CNN, actually represents the final fallout from an earlier story that the Washington Post called “one of the biggest journalistic embarrassments in CNN’s 37-year history.” On June 22nd, 2017, a “bombshell” CNN report linked Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci with a ten billion dollar Russian investment fund (supposedly tied to a sanctioned Russian Bank) and a request by two Democrat senators for the Treasury department to investigate whether Scaramucci offered to lift sanctions against Russia during a January 16th, 2017 restaurant meeting with the fund’s chief executive. For his part, Anthony Scaramucci vehemently denied the allegations, and while reports are not entirely conclusive, rumor has it he threatened to file a very hefty libel suit against the network. A brief internal investigation ensued, revealing (among other things) that the article was based on information from a single anonymous source, who when contacted after publication said he “had “concerns” about the article’s central assertion and the way the information had been couched.” Without a leg to stand on and already reeling from previous mistakes, CNN retracted the entire story, then posted an apology to Scaramucci and finally accepted the “resignation” of three veteran journalists who’d worked on the now-deleted “bombshell.”

Manafort Notes From Russian Meet Contain Cryptic Reference to ‘Donations’ – arguably one of the most mindbogglingly moronic Russiagate “bombshell” corrections, this August 31st, 2017 NBC report by exposed “former” CIA “mop-up man” propagandist Ken Dilanian and Carol E. Lee initially, and hilariously, claimed that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s notes from the now infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, “included the word “donations,” near a reference to the Republican National Committee” before very specifically adding that the notes “contained the words “donations,” and “RNC” in close proximity.” There was just one problem, a spokesman for Senator Chuck Grassley (whose staff have actually seen the notes) and an anonymous source who spoke to Talking Points Memo, immediately denied that the words “donations” or “donors” appeared at all. The argument then devolved into semantics with NBC printing a correction that essentially admits that both of their sources lied to them and they just went with it because “fuck journalism” – while still hiding behind the difference between “donations” (which they clearly quoted, twice) and “donors” (which the TPM source refuted as well) and an as of yet unrevealed word that somehow means “political contributions.“