By Robert Parry
\nConsortiumNews.com<\/p>\n
As much as the U.S. mainstream media wants people to believe that it is the Guardian of Truth, it is actually lost in a wilderness of propaganda and falsehoods, a dangerous land of delusion that is putting the future of humankind at risk as tension escalate with nuclear-armed Russia.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nRussian President Vladimir Putin addresses a crowd on May 9, 2014, celebrating the 69th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Crimean port city of Sevastopol from the Nazis. (Russian government photo)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
This media problem has grown over recent decades as lucrative careerism has replaced responsible professionalism. Pack journalism has always been a threat to quality reporting but now it has evolved into a self-sustaining media lifestyle in which the old motto, \u201cthere\u2019s safety in numbers,\u201d is borne out by the fact that being horrendously wrong, such as on Iraq\u2019s WMD, leads to almost no accountability because so many important colleagues were wrong as well.<\/p>\n
Similarly, there has been no accountability after many mainstream journalists and commentators falsely stated as flat-fact that \u201call 17 U.S. intelligence agencies\u201d concurred that Russia did \u201cmeddle\u201d in last November\u2019s U.S. election.<\/p>\n
For months, this claim has been the go-to put-down whenever anyone questions the groupthink of Russian venality perverting American democracy. Even the esteemed \u201cPolitifact\u201d deemed the assertion \u201ctrue.\u201d But it was never true.<\/p>\n
It was at best a needled distortion of a claim by President Obama\u2019s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper when he issued\u00a0a statement<\/a>\u00a0last Oct. 7 alleging Russian meddling. Because Clapper was the chief of the U.S. Intelligence Community, his opinion morphed into a claim that it represented the consensus of all 17 intelligence agencies, a dishonest twist that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton began touting.<\/p>\n However, for people who understand how the U.S. Intelligence Community works, the claim of a 17-agencies consensus has a specific meaning, some form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE) that seeks out judgments and dissents from the various agencies.<\/p>\n But there was no NIE regarding alleged Russian meddling and there apparently wasn\u2019t even a formal assessment from a subset of the agencies at the time of Clapper\u2019s statement. President Obama did not order a publishable assessment until December \u2013 after the election \u2013 and it was not completed until Jan. 6, when a report from Clapper\u2019s office presented the opinions of analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency \u2013 three agencies (or four if you count the DNI\u2019s office), not 17.<\/p>\n Lacking Hard Evidence<\/strong><\/p>\n The report also contained\u00a0no hard evidence<\/a>\u00a0of a Russian \u201chack\u201d and amounted to a one-sided circumstantial case at best. However, by then, the U.S. mainstream media had embraced the \u201call-17-intelligence-agencies\u201d refrain and anyone who disagreed, including President Trump, was treated as delusional. The argument went: \u201cHow can anyone question what all 17 intelligence agencies have confirmed as true?\u201d<\/p>\n Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It wasn\u2019t until May 8 when then-former DNI Clapper belatedly\u00a0set the record straight<\/a>in sworn congressional testimony in which he explained that there were only three \u201ccontributing agencies\u201d from which analysts were \u201chand-picked.\u201d<\/p>\n The reference to \u201chand-picked\u201d analysts pricked the ears of some former U.S. intelligence analysts who had suffered through earlier periods of \u201cpoliticized\u201d intelligence when malleable analysts were chosen to deliver what their political bosses wanted to hear.<\/p>\n On May 23, also in congressional testimony, former CIA Director John Brennan confirmed Clapper\u2019s description, saying only four of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies took part in the assessment.<\/p>\n Brennan said the Jan. 6 report \u201cfollowed the general model of how you want to do something like this with some notable exceptions. It only involved the FBI, NSA and CIA as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It wasn\u2019t a full inter-agency community assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n After this testimony, some of the major news organizations, which had been waving around the \u201c17-intelligence-agencies\u201d meme, subtly changed their phrasing to either depict Russian \u201cmeddling\u201d as an established fact no longer requiring attribution or referred to the \u201cunanimous judgment\u201d of the Intelligence Community without citing a specific number.<\/p>\n This \u201cunanimous judgment\u201d formulation was deceptive, too, because it suggested that all 17 agencies were in accord albeit without exactly saying that. For a regular reader of The New York Times or a frequent viewer of CNN, the distinction would almost assuredly not be detected.<\/p>\n For more than a month after the Clapper-Brennan testimonies, there was no formal correction.<\/p>\n A Belated Correction<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, on June 25, the Times\u2019\u00a0hand was forced<\/a>\u00a0when White House correspondent Maggie Haberman reverted to the old formulation, mocking Trump for \u201cstill refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.\u201d<\/p>\n New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When this falsehood was called to the Times\u2019 attention, it had little choice but to append a correction to the article, noting that the intelligence \u201cassessment was made by four intelligence agencies \u2014 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.\u201d<\/p>\n The Associated Press ran a similar \u201cclarification\u201d applied to some of its fallacious reporting repeating the \u201c17-intelligence-agencies\u201d meme.<\/p>\n So, you might have thought that the mainstream media was finally adjusting its reporting to conform to reality. But that would mean that one of the pillars of the Russia-gate \u201cscandal\u201d had crumbled, the certainty that Russia and Vladimir Putin did \u201cmeddle\u201d in the election.<\/p>\n The story would have to go back to square one and the major news organizations would have to begin reporting on whether or not there ever was solid evidence to support what had become a \u201ccertainty\u201d \u2013 and there appeared to be no stomach for such soul-searching. Since pretty much all the important media figures had made the same error, it would be much easier to simply move on as if nothing had changed.<\/p>\n That would mean that skepticism would still be unwelcome and curious leads would not be followed. For instance, there was a head-turning reference in an otherwise typical Washington Post take-out on June 25 accusing Russia of committing \u201cthe crime of the century.\u201d<\/p>\n A reference, stuck deep inside the five-page opus, said, \u201cSome of the most critical technical intelligence on Russia came from another country, officials said. Because of the source of the material, the NSA was reluctant to view it with high confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n Though the Post did not identify the country, this reference suggests that more than one key element of the case for Russian culpability was based not on direct investigations by the U.S. intelligence agencies, but on the work of external organizations.<\/p>\n Earlier, the Democratic National Committee denied the FBI access to its supposedly hacked computers, forcing the investigators to rely on a DNC contractor called CrowdStrike, which has a checkered record of getting this sort of analytics right and whose chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, is an anti-Putin Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 with ties to the anti-Russian think tank, Atlantic Council.<\/p>\n Relying on Outsiders<\/strong><\/p>\n You might be wondering why something as important as this \u201ccrime of the century,\u201d which has pushed the world closer to nuclear annihilation, is dependent on dubious entities outside the U.S. government with possible conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If the U.S. government really took this issue seriously, which it should, why didn\u2019t the FBI seize the DNC\u2019s computers and insist that impartial government experts lead the investigation? And why \u2013 given the extraordinary expertise of the NSA in computer hacking \u2013 is \u201csome of the most critical technical intelligence on Russia [coming] from another country,\u201d one that doesn\u2019t inspire the NSA\u2019s confidence?<\/p>\n But such pesky questions are not likely to be asked or answered by a mainstream U.S. media that displays deep-seated bias toward both Putin and Trump.<\/p>\n Mostly, major news outlets continue to brush aside the clarifications and return to various formulations that continue to embrace the \u201c17-intelligence-agencies\u201d canard, albeit in slightly different forms, such as references to the collective Intelligence Community without the specific number. Anyone who questions this established conventional wisdom is still crazy and out of step.<\/p>\n For instance, James Holmes of Esquire\u00a0was stunned<\/a>\u00a0on Thursday when Trump at a news conference in Poland reminded the traveling press corps about the inaccurate reporting regarding the 17 intelligence agencies and said he still wasn\u2019t entirely sure about Russia\u2019s guilt.<\/p>\n \u201cIn public, he\u2019s still casting doubt on the intelligence community\u2019s finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election nearly nine months after the fact,\u201d Holmes sputtered before describing Trump\u2019s comment as a \u201crant.\u201d<\/p>\n So, if you thought that a chastened mainstream media might stop in the wake of the \u201c17-intelligence-agencies\u201d falsehood and rethink the whole Russia-gate business, you would have been sadly mistaken.<\/p>\n But the problem is not just the question of whether Russia hacked into Democratic emails and slipped them to WikiLeaks for publication (something that both Russia and WikiLeaks deny). Perhaps the larger danger is how the major U.S. news outlets have adopted a consistently propagandistic approach toward everything relating to Russia.<\/p>\n Hating Putin<\/strong><\/p>\n This pattern traces back to the earliest days of Vladimir Putin\u2019s presidency in 2000 when he began to rein in the U.S.-prescribed \u201cshock therapy,\u201d which had sold off Russia\u2019s assets to well-connected insiders, making billions of dollars for the West-favored \u201coligarchs,\u201d even as the process threw millions of average Russian into poverty.<\/p>\n Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the U.S. mainstream media\u2019s contempt for Putin\u00a0reached new heights<\/a>\u00a0after he helped President Obama head off neoconservative (and liberal interventionist) demands for a full-scale U.S. military assault on Syria in August 2013 and helped bring Iran into a restrictive nuclear agreement when the neocons wanted to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.<\/p>\n The neocons delivered their payback to Putin in early 2014 by supporting a violent coup in Ukraine, overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and installing a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. operation was\u00a0spearheaded<\/a>\u00a0by neocon National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman and neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, with enthusiastic support from neocon Sen. John McCain.<\/p>\n Nuland was heard in an intercepted pre-coup phone call with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should become the new leaders and pondering how to \u201cglue\u201d or \u201cmidwife this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the clear evidence of U.S. interference in Ukrainian politics, the U.S. government and the mainstream media embraced the coup and accused Putin of \u201caggression\u201d when ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, called the Donbas, resisted the coup regime.<\/p>\n When ethnic Russians and other citizens in Crimea voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to reject the coup regime and rejoin Russia \u2013 a move protected by some of the 20,000 Russian troops inside Crimea as part of a basing agreement \u2013 that became a Russian \u201cinvasion.\u201d But it was the most peculiar \u201cinvasion,\u201d since there were no images of tanks crashing across borders or amphibious landing craft on Crimean beaches, because no such \u201cinvasion\u201d had occurred.<\/p>\n However, in virtually every instance, the U.S. mainstream media insisted on the most extreme anti-Russian propaganda line and accused people who questioned this Official Narrative of\u00a0disseminating Russian \u201cpropaganda\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 or being a \u201cMoscow stooge\u201d or acting as a \u201cuseful fool.\u201d There was no tolerance for skepticism about whatever the State Department or the Washington think tanks were saying.<\/p>\n Trump Meets Putin<\/strong><\/p>\n So, as Trump prepares for his first meeting with Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, the U.S. mainstream media has been in a frenzy, linking up its groupthinks about the Ukraine \u201cinvasion\u201d with its groupthinks about Russian \u201chacking\u201d the election.<\/p>\n Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. (Photo credit: Aude)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n