What Shall It Be -- Press Or Propaganda?

Whatever vestigial notions that a free press remained within the legacy media died this past week, as two seemingly unrelated stories combined to demonstrate the extent to which the legacy media is not free, and does not wish to be free.

The week began with Attorney General William Barr's much-heralded appearances before two Congressional committees, during which he uttered a simple sentence that has the legacy media positively epileptic and apoplectic: "I think spying did occur."

The "spying" to which he refers, of course, is the government surveillance of President Trump's 2016 campaign for office. Virtually the whole of the legacy media immediately and roundly excoriated Attorney General Barr for making a supposedly outlandish and unsubstantiated claim.

The second story of note occurred when Julian Assange, founder of the now famous (or infamous) disclosure web site WikiLeaks, was arrested in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, and now faces possible extradition to the United States, accused in relation to then-Bradley/now-Chelsea Manning's 2010 theft and disclosure of US military secrets.

Where these seemingly disconnected stories coincide is in the fertile fields of press freedom and press objectivity, and the degree to which these are inextricably intertwined.  

The consensus of the legacy media on Attorney General Barr's assessment that the US government spied on a political campaign during an election cycle is that Barr advanced a noxious "conspiracy theory". Chuck Todd of NBC News asserted there was "zero factual basis" for the claim. MSNBC's Nick Ackerman accused Bar of participating in a "White House coverup" of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report to the Attorney General regarding possible collusion between then-Candidate Donald Trump's election campaign and the Russian government. Over at CNN, Anderson Cooper pontificated that Barr's comments were "an insult to the men and women" of the Department of Justice.

Democrats in Congress quickly jumped on  the noveaux conspiracy theory bandwagon. Representative Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, insisted on Twitter that Barr was directly contradicting earlier DOJ testimonies:

These comments directly contradict what DOJ previously told us. I’ve asked DOJ to brief us immediately. In the meantime, the AG still owes us the full Mueller report. #ReleaseTheReport https://t.co/DFOP5igcnO

— (((Rep. Nadler))) (@RepJerryNadler) April 10, 2019

Senator Mark Warner called Barr "irresponsible":

Mr. Barr knows how counter-intel investigations work. He knows there was ample evidence of Russian attempts to infiltrate the Trump campaign and that the FBI took lawful action to stop it. Giving a wink and a nod to this long-debunked “spying” conspiracy theory is irresponsible.

— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) April 10, 2019

Senator Chuck Schumer panned Barr's comments "beneath the office of the Attorney General:

AG Barr admitted he had no evidence to support his claim that spying on the Trump campaign “did occur.”

AG Barr must retract his statement immediately or produce specific evidence to back it up.

Perpetuating conspiracy theories is beneath the office of the Attorney General.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 10, 2019

What both the legacy media and the Democrats overlook is the reality of government actions taken with regard to President Trump's 2016 campaign:

• The FBI sought and received a warrant to conduct surveillance on one-time Trump campaign staffer Carter Page in October 2016.  That warrant is publicly available--its existence is a fact not open to dispute.
• British-based academic Stephen Halper was recruited by elements of the FBI to gather information on both Carter Page and fellow campaign staffer George Papadapolous.
• The infamous and much-derided "Steele Dossier" was compiled by a former British intelligence agent who was also an informant for the FBI.
• None of these actions were known to the Trump campaign while they were ongoing.

None of these facts are in dispute.  Nor can anyone dispute the dictionary definition of the word "spy": 

to watch secretly usually for hostile purposes

The United States government conducted secret surveillance on President Donald Trump.  There is no denying this. 

There is also no denying the fundamentally hostile intent of that surveillance. Any effort to find evidence of malfeasance by an individual is intrinsically hostile to that individual. The Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution are constant reminders of the individual's need and right to defend himself or herself against the intrinsic hostility of any government investigation or accusation.

Yet the legacy media is denying both realities, with no hint of either irony or self-reflection.  To call Attorney General Barr's statement "conspiracy theory" is to completely ignore established empirical, factual, unimpeachable evidence of what the FBI did and when they did it. To call that statement a "cover-up" is to advance a narrative that is fundamentally and irreparably at odds with reality, so much so that words such as "delusional" are fitting descriptors of media behavior.

The United States government spied on Donald Trump. Arguing otherwise is an unconvincing exercise in pure propaganda.

It is against this backdrop of a lunatic legacy media peddling propaganda that we must now consider the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange immediately after having his asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London revoked.

Assange's immediate arrest was in relation to a 2012 sexual assault charge against him in Sweden. He took refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition from the UK to Sweden to stand trial for that offense.

However, the United States government has also long wanted to prosecute Assange for his role in publishing the reams of classified documents stolen by then-Bradley/now-Chelsea Manning in 2010--military secrets which some claim exposed intelligence gathering sources and methods, the disclosure of which arguably put lives directly at risk.  Following Assange's arrest by the London police, the United States revealed indictments against him charging conspiracy with Manning in the 2010 data breach and publication.  Assange, the US government has argued, in equally complicit and equally guilty as Manning is regarding the latter's demonstrable criminal activity.

As with Barr's "spying" comments, there are certain empirical factual realities attached to Assange's arrest:

• Manning was convicted by court martial for espionage and theft for stealing classified military documents 
• Manning has acknowledged transmitting them to WikiLeaks, which published much of the material, which is still online, and for which WikiLeaks has established custom searches to facilitate browsing of certain subsets of the material, such as the Afghan War Diaries.
• The DOJ has alleged in its indictment that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks assisted Manning by cracking certain encrypted passwords. 
• The DOJ also alleges that Assange encouraged Manning to obtain more classified materials for publication.  It is worth noting that Manning's statements regarding his submissions to WikiLeaks do not provide any direct confirmation of these allegations.

The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned Assange's arrest, stating "..prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent...." Indeed, the central point of opposition to Assange's indictment is that WikiLeaks is a publisher, and that their disclosures of government secrets is, arguably, a form of journalism.

No less a legal authority than Harvard Law Professor-Emeritus Alan Dershowitz has argued that WikiLeaks is a publishing organization no different from the New York Times and the Washington Post. These newspapers published the archive of classified military secrets known as "The Pentagon Papers" in 1971--not only were they never charged with a crime, they won a Pulitzer Prize for their efforts. 

The New York Times in 2016 also published excerpts of Donald Trump's tax returns for 1995. Tax returns are privileged and confidential, and whomever provided the documents to the Times unquestionably obtained them illegally.  The New York Times was not charged with a crime in that incident either, and at least one legal scholar argued that its publication of illegally obtained tax records could not be prosecuted under the First Amendment.

The DOJ case is further convoluted by the fact that the standard federal statute of limitations is 5 years, and this indictment is presented well outside of that time frame. According to Andrew McCarthy, writing in the National Review, the government appears to be relying on an exemption to the five-year rule for terrorists and terrorist sympathizers, which extends the statute to eight years--which in turn requires making a solid legal case that Julian Assange is, in fact, a terrorist and not a journalist, and that WikiLeaks is, in fact, a terrorist organization and not a publisher.

The legacy media has been quite content to indulge the government in advancing this argument, and to give preferential audience to those public figures willing to champion this argument.  Some even found Assange's arrest an occasion for sarcasm and levity.  The consensus of the legacy media, with few exceptions outside of Fox News' Tucker Carlson, is that Julian Assange is getting his comeuppance.

Yet what makes WikiLeaks a publisher (and Assange therefore a journalist) is the inescapable reality that it publishes information--just like the New York Times, and just like the Washington Post. Just as the New York Times was not prosecuted for the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks should not be prosecuted for Manning's stolen files. To consider otherwise is to grant the government a license that is not specified within the Constitution or any amendment--the power to effectively license media outlets. To consider otherwise is to eliminate the First Amendment protections upon which freedom of the press depends.

WikiLeaks is a news publisher, and its contributors are journalists. No government gets to say otherwise. No government should say otherwise.

This much is certain: government-sanctioned press is not free press.  Media outlets that must seek the approval of the State cannot possibly hold that State to any form of account. It requires no deep training in the law to understand this reality, and to understand the dangers it poses to the freedom and liberty that are this nation's bequest to future generations.

So it is that we close this second week of April, 2019, with one of the most cherished of American institutions--a free and unfettered press, able to hold government to account and not be held accountable to government--under existential threat from within and without.  In denying the simple reality that government agencies can and have spied on US citizens, the legacy media, long the embodiment of the free and unfettered press, has abandoned that position entirely. In denying the simple reality that WikiLeaks is a publisher of information, legacy media has declared there shall be no more free press, but only government sanctioned press.

So it is that we, as a society, must look ever more critically at all the media, both the legacy entities and the upstart alternative outlets, and decide which ones will be the path for journalism in this country in the future.  Will we have a free and unfettered press, powered by a disruptive coterie of independent media sources, or will we have a corporatized and compromised press, residing within the legacy media, content to promote only such narratives as find favor with the blessed few? Will we have rich sources of useful information, or will we have pathetic purveyors of pabulum and propaganda? 

What shall it be: press or propaganda? Sadly, the answer is not at the moment certain.

Trust No More: The Death Of The Free Press

In the wake of a week of media meltdowns over the much heralded and now much maligned Mueller Report comes this Twitter thread from freelance journalist Yashar Ali:

1. Yesterday, I received a call from @DafnaLinzer who serves as managing editor of NBC/MSNBC politics. Dafna's conduct during the call was highly inappropriate and unethical. So what was the purpose of her call? 

She called me to bully me on behalf of the DNC.

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) March 29, 2019

The thread goes on to detail a telephone exchange between Yashar Ali and Ms Linzer regarding her request for him to delay publication of a news scoop regarding the debates for the upcoming Democratic 2020 primaries. Suffice it to say, Yashar Ali's assertion that Ms Linzer tried to intimidate him is an accurate summary of the thread.

More disturbingly, Yashar Ali amplifies a major criticism made throughout Rolling Stone editor Matt Tabibi's deconstruction of how the media handled "Russiagate" and the subsequent Mueller Investigation--the unholy (and in many cases unethical) allegiance between legacy news operations and the major political parties.

Matt Tabibi does a deep dive on the thrust of my last posting, which was to reiterate how the verifiable objective facts surrounding the Russia Collusion Hoax (also known as the Great Russia Hacking Hoax) told a vastly different story than the narrative being pushed by the legacy media.

Ali, Tabibi, and myself are all speaking to the same larger problem within this nation's political culture: the blatant allegiance and explicit subservience of erstwhile "objective" news agencies to political parties, figures, and agendas. Presentation of fact has been supplanted by promotion of narrative.

Welcome to the "post-factual" world.

Except there is no such world.  From the evidences of our five senses to the reporting we see in both the legacy and alternative media, both our world and our understanding of it are defined by facts (or at least by our perception of facts).  Facts are the only thing to tell us where we have been and the only aid we have to guide our future.

All facts matter.

News media outlets are our main source of facts.  We rely on the media to know what our politicians our doing, we rely on the media to explain the reality (or unreality) of climate change, we rely on the media to know whether the Red Sox have beaten the Yankees.

What are we to do when we find the media is prepared to lie to us? How should we respond when we learn the media is prepared to suppress facts? Consider the following:

• Reuters reporter Joseph Menn buried a potentially explosive story about former Texas Senatorial candidate and current Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Francis "Beto" O' Rourke.
• ABC, CBS and NBC evening news devoted some 2,284 minutes covering the Russia "collusion" story. From the conclusions reached by Robert Mueller, very little of that reporting qualifies as "fact based".
• In the wake of the hysteria over the confrontation between Covington Catholic High School Student Nick Sandman and Native American activist Nathan Phillips, CNN news analyst Kirsten Powers claimed in a tweet the Covington students used a racial slur to refer to one of their classmates. The accusation was blatantly false, and Kirsten Powers has not only deleted the slanderous tweet, she has since apologized for her "judgemental and condemning tweets" regarding Covington Catholic. (Note: CNN has largely scrubbed its initial reporting of the Covington Catholic controversy from its website).  CNN and the Washington Post have since been sued by Nick Sandman for their demonstrably false reporting on the event.

These are but a few examples of the legacy media not reporting the facts.  With respect to the Russia Collusion Hoax, I have commented on multiple occasions how the media narratives simply ignore the facts, even when they are the ones presenting them:

• January 7, 2017, I pointed out how the ICA Report on Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election had no factual grounding.
• May 11, 2017, I documented the conspicuous lack of any actual evidence, AKA "facts" to support the "Russia meddling" narrative, highlighting factual statements by people purported to have direct knowledge and expertise on the topic which directly contradicted the legacy media narrative.
• July 17, 2018, I outlined how Mueller's investigation and indictments to that point had failed to disclose any factual basis for the legacy media narrative that Candidate Donald Trump "colluded" with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.

As Matt Tabibi describes quite powerfully, these journalistic failures are devastating to the credibility of the legacy media.  Even more devastating is how these failures came about -- the willing, deliberate, intentional choice by the legacy media to adopt pro-Democratic narratives, ignoring objective reporting which did not conform official party propaganda, and even making up stories simply to further the official party line.

Most devastating of all is the legacy media's frank admissions of this choice.  As early as August of 2015, the New York Times, lofty "Gray Lady" herself, bluntly acknowledged that many media outlets no longer pretended to cover then-Candidate Donald Trump objectively. The New York Times doubled down on that choice just a year later when it proudly promoted the case for abandoning fact-based reporting in favor of an all out assault on the Republican nominee for President.

The free press is clearly dead in this country. To the extent that objective reporting ever existed, among the legacy media it no longer exists. When the Twitterverse describes CNN as "The Most Busted Name In Fake News", we must accept that description is now factual. And we must accept that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and MSNBC are little better.  The legacy media now lie. They lie routinely. They lie brazenly. They lie carelessly.

Will the alternative media rise to take the place of the legacy media as the primary source for facts about the world in which we live? That is the hope. There are small and growing news outlets that at least for now are still wedded to the idea of reporting the facts. And there are a growing number of so-called "citizen journalists" and "citizen commentators" who, armed with little more than a blog or a YouTube channel take pride in presenting the facts to a credulous world. I am coming to take a certain pride in counting myself among their number.

Yet what the alternative media will never be able to provide is an abiding sense of trust.  The legacy media has destroyed that trust for all media and for all time.  If CNN can brazenly lie, then so can One America News Network.  If Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow can promote factually false and clearly debunked narratives, then so can alternative media icon Tim Poole--and clearly, so can I. No protestation nor promise to remain objective will provide the media audience with any assurance that, in fact, objectivity will be preserved.

What you, the audience, must therefore do is abandon trust.  Do not accept a narrative merely because it appears on a favored outlet.  Do not presume even my interpretation of events is sound, or my recitation of facts is correct. Follow the links within my posts and read my source materials for yourself.  Take the time to do your own research. Form your own conclusions--and challenge interpretation with which you disagree.  

Do not trust. Verify instead.

REALITY CHECK: Russia Voiced Her Opinion About Our Politics. No More. No Less.

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

So begins the US Intelligence Community's briefing to President Obama and President-Elect Donald Trump regarding alleged Russian interventions into the 2016 Presidential Election cycle.

For the most part, the reaction to this conclusion should be a colossal and universal "so what?" Russia under Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian borderline fascist dictatorship. Putin's preferred model of governance is about as antithetical to the principles of republican representative democracy as can be had this side of Josef Stalin--but, perversely, outside of certain cyber-intrusions of the Democratic National Committee, the mechanisms he has to "undermine" the "liberal democratic order" are simply the institutions of the American "liberal democratic order." The only way for Putin to influence our democracy is to participate in it.

To appreciate Putin's alleged tactics and the processes he wishes to undermine, we must begin at the core of those processes--the United States Constitution. Of particular note, we must bring to the fore the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In the United States, rights are boundaries which enclose and delimit the powers of government--with the freedoms of the people ranging far and wide beyond. In the United States, the supreme civic virtue is that voices be heard. People may be right or wrong in their ideas, successful or unsuccessful in their exhortations, but what they should never be is silent. The American ideal of public discourse is raucous, noisy, chaotic--and above all, free from restraint.

How is this relevant? Consider the assessed mechanisms by which Putin purportedly sought to influence American elections:

We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks. 

Disclosing information via DCLeaks.com, WikiLeaks, and the mainstream media is itself speech. It is a participation in the public discourse, a voice crying out to be heard. It is presumably a Russian voice, a voice that has little standing in American political discourse, but it is still a voice. Moreover, as a voice it could only be heard because of our "liberal democratic order." Far from undermining that order, Putin's alleged activities demonstrate its elemental and undiminished strength.

We are also reminded the material released was "victim data." Whether obtained by hack or by unauthorized insider, the materials released on DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks were obtained illegally. This much is absolutely certain. Still, history shows our society prefers to hear even criminally informed voices. The Pentagon Papers were initially stolen, as were the snippets of Donald Trump's income tax returns published by the New York Times during the election.

Moreover, as Newsweek rather conveniently rationalized, the laws criminalizing the acquisition and publication of this material are, arguably, a restraint on speech and, as such, not possible under the First Amendment. In defending the New York Times' decision to publish tax information stolen from Donald Trump, Newsweek paid homage to Bartnicki v Vopper (532 U.S. 514), which struck down a federal statute barring the publication of information obtained by illegal means. By the same logic that made it acceptable for the New York Times to publish Donald Trump's illegally obtained tax returns, it it is equally acceptable for DCLeaks and WikiLeaks to publish the illegally obtained email archives of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta.

Despite the hyperventilations of the Obama Administration, the most that can be said of Vladimir Putin's activities during the election cycle is that he arrogated to himself a voice with which to participate in the public debate over whom should be America's 45th President. There are many pejoratives that attach to such an effort--"invasive", "arrogant", "rude" just to name a few--but, ironically, "undemocratic" really is not one of them. If Putin weighing in on American electoral politics is wrong, then it was wrong for Barack Obama to have weighed in on Britain's Brexit referendum. If Putin is wrong, then the US State Department was wrong to have spent $350,000 of taxpayer money in an effort to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015.

People may not like that Putin has sought a voice in American electoral politics, but it is disingenuous if not deceitful to pretend that anyone--even a despotic dictator such as Putin--seeking a voice is antithetical to America's "liberal democratic order," and it is dangerously naive to pretend that the intrusion of such foreign voices into the "liberal democratic order" is not very much the establish political order of things.

Absent the alleged cybercrimes (and we must remember they are "alleged" because conclusive proof of anyone's guilt in the penetrations of the DNC networks is for now an elusive commodity), all Putin has done is express an opinion. In our "liberal democratic order", we prefer that opinions be expressed rather than excluded.

Opinions are not the enemy of democracy, but the foundation of it. If Putin truly seeks to undermine American political processes, he is going to need better tactics than participation in political discourse.

Straight From The Gray Lady--The Media Is Officially Untrustworthy

As a general rule, it is a bad idea to build too much off a single quote from a single source. Context and nuance alone can render the single quote's informational value problematic at best.  My preference is always to build a thesis using multiple sources, unifying the multiple data points into a single thesis.

However, there is the rare occasion when the single quote is noteworthy all on its own, when a single news item is noteworthy all on its own. This morning, the New York Times gave us one such news item. That it is regarding the insurgent political firebrand Donald Trump should surprise no one.

What is surprising is the frank admission the New York Times makes regarding Spanish-language news media covering Donald Trump's campaign, and Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos in particular.  Ramos was the journalist who was rather unceremoniously ejected from a Trump press conference yesterday (depending on one's perspective, because he was challenging Trump on his immigration policy or because he was being rude, unprofessional, and disruptive--I am very specifically avoiding commenting on either perspective here as it is wholly not relevant to the topic at hand). The New York Times said very explicitly that Univision--and indeed all the Spanish-language news media, is clearly and unapologetically biased where their coverage of Donald Trump is concerned.  Specifically, New York Times reporter Ashley Parker wrote the following (emphasis is mine):

Mr. Ramos was eventually allowed to return. But for the Spanish-language press, which has grown in size and influence in politics, the tense exchange was a highly public flexing of muscle against a candidate who many outlets no longer pretend to cover objectively: They are offended by Mr. Trump’s words and tactics — and they are showing it.

People should pause to reflect that the essence of journalism is that dispassionate objectivity the New York Times freely acknowledges is being dispensed in at least some cases regarding Mr. Trump.  The full definition of the word "journalism" in Merriam-Webster reads as follows (again, emphasis is mine):

1

a :  the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media

b :  the public press

c :  an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium

2

a :  writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine

b :  writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation

c :  writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times did not enumerate which of the many news outlets it felt have eschewed the core journalist virtue of objectivity where Donald Trump is concerned. However, it does not need to make that enumeration. The New York Times is a news outlet itself of no small consequence; it is a paper with a long publication history, and bills itself as "All the News That's Fit to Print.".  

Today, the news that is fit to print is that at least some portions of the news media are not interested in being objective regarding a leading candidate for the Presidency of the United States. Today, the news that is fit to print is that at least some portions of the news media are not interested in presenting the entirety of the factual record surrounding Donald Trump's chosen signature issue--illegal immigration. Today, the news that is fit to print is that at least some portions of the news media are in fact lying to their readers--they are either misrepresenting Donald Trump's stances and statements, or they are misrepresenting their own advocacy and bias regarding those stances and statements.  Today, the news that is fit to print is the admission by the New York Times that the news media itself, long arrogating to itself the position of the "Fourth Estate" somehow above the dirt and mud of politics and issues, has finally and unapologetically descended into that political dirt and political mud.

It matters not that some only some news outlets are shamelessly biased. It matters not that they are only shamelessly biased against Donald Trump. It matters not because the nature of bias is such that it cannot be just some outlets and it cannot be just Donald Trump. Misrepresenting his stances and statements mispositions other candidates stances and statements, and thus misrepresents all candidates. To misrepresent Donald Trump is to simultaneously misrepresent Hillary Clinton. To misrepresent Donald Trump is to misrepresent Barack Obama. There is no position of political philosophy or ideology that can proceed with a substantive and honest discussion of either candidates or issues when there is not at least an effort at honesty and objectivity. To allow biased advocacy as objective journalism--which even the New York Times ultimately is doing--without criticizing at least Univision and Jorge Ramos for their departure from traditional journalistic standards is to be complicit in that bias and to be complicit in the lie. If any of the news media tolerate bias from any of the news media, the credibility of all news media is called into question.

This is noteworthy not because it is shocking to find media bias. Accusations of media bias have been around for as long as there have been news media. This is noteworthy because the media has reached a level either of arrogance or cognitive dissonance that it no longer cares whether or not it is seen as biased.

Supporters of Donald Trump will with some justification read the New York Times article with a sense of "I told you so!". But anyone who reads the New York Times coverage of Trump's dustup with Jorge Ramos and Univision is left with the same unsavory conclusion--American news media is simply not trustworthy, nor does it care to be.