USA 2020 Elections: Thread

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Fake News Journos are Lying to You 24x365...


https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-illustrating-how-they

Greenwald: Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Spread A
Significant Lie All Over Twitter

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com
Hunter Biden (L) and then-Vice President Joe Biden speak on stage at
Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets
disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to
hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While
some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their
claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this
very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this
is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public
trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the
procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the
2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a
series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in
Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting
of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter
account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time
Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress
the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this
reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their
refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the
materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian
disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA
officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted
to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first
story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on
his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists,
led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a
letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all
the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these
security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize
that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do
not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience
makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a
significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from
trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that
they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets
uncritically ratified this assertion.

This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced
my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first
time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on
editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly
alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that
reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about
their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial
standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my
article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their
censorship of my article, they published an article by a different
journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit
purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated
the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when
they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those
intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their
assertion. From The Intercept on October 21:

    Their latest falsehood once again involves Biden, Ukraine, and a
laptop mysteriously discovered in a computer repair shop and passed to
the New York Post, thanks to Trump crony Rudy Giuliani….. The U.S.
intelligence community had previously warned the White House that
Giuliani has been the target of a Russian intelligence operation to
disseminate disinformation about Biden, and the FBI has been
investigating whether the strange story about the Biden laptop is part
of a Russian disinformation campaign. This week, a group of former
intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop
story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.

Oh my, marvel at those extremely rigorous editorial standards:
regurgitating serious accusations from ex-CIA operatives without
bothering to note that they were unaccompanied by evidence and that
even those agents admitted they had none. But, as they usually do
these days, The Intercept had plenty of company in the corporate
media.

That those materials were “Russian disinformation” became so
reflexively accepted by the U.S. media that it became the principal
excuse to ignore and even censor the reporting, and it also helpfully
handed the Biden campaign an easy excuse to avoid answering any
questions about what the documents revealed. “I think we need to be
very, very clear that what he's doing here is amplifying Russian
misinformation," said Biden Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield
when asked about the prospect that Trump would raise the Biden emails
at the debate. From the CIA’s lips to the mouths of corporate
journalists into the hands of the Biden campaign.

As the U.S. media disseminated this “disinformation” tale, nobody —
including the Bidens — has ever claimed let alone demonstrated that a
single document was anything other than genuine — something that would
be exceedingly easy to do if the documents were fraudulent. "The Biden
team has rejected some of the claims made in the NY Post articles, but
has not disputed the authenticity of the [laptop] files upon which
they were based,” acknowledged The New York Times. Ample evidence
corroborates that the documents are genuine.

As for the claims of Russian involvement in the laptop story, there
was never any evidence for it: none. The CIA operatives who invented
that storyline acknowledged that. The week that tale emerged, The New
York Times reported that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the
laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the
FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation
on the laptop.” The Washington Post published an op-ed by Russia
fanatic Thomas Rid who candidly pronounced: “We must treat the Hunter
Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if
they probably aren't." And the only time the U.S. Government has ever
spoken on this question was when the Director of National Intelligence
stated: “Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of some Russian
disinformation campaign."

These documents raised important questions about the presidential
frontrunner’s knowledge of or participation in his family members’
attempt to profit off of their association with him, questions
implicating his integrity, ethics and honesty. Yet those documents
were suppressed by a gigantic fraud, perpetrated by the CIA and their
media allies, which claimed that the documents were forged and that
they came from Russia.

That is the critical context for the lie spread yesterday by numerous
mainstream journalists. On Tuesday morning, the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence declassified a short 12-page report entitled
“Foreign Threats to the U.S. 2020 Elections.”

It reviewed the actions of numerous countries with regard to the 2020
election. The intelligence community claimed — without presenting any
evidence whatsoever — that “Russian President Putin
authorized…influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s
candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump,
undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and
exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.” The New York Times’
largely credulous article about this report contained this admission,
one you would think (or, rather, hope) would matter to journalists:
“The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence
community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during
the 2020 election.”

Despite that glaring omission, media outlets predictably treated the
evidence-free assertions from the security state as fact. “Vladimir
Putin did it again,” trumpeted Mother Jones’ David Corn without an
iota of skepticism. CNN’s Marshall Cohen actually said this:

    The report confirms what was largely assumed, and barely hidden,
last year: Trump and his allies publicly embraced Russia's
disinformation campaign against Biden, met with Kremlin-tied figures
who were part of the effort, and promoted their conspiracies
https://t.co/Wjhss5U6Nk
    — Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) March 16, 2021

Think about that: to a CNN reporter, evidence-free assertions from the
U.S. security state are tantamount to “confirmation.” That they really
do think this way is nothing short of chilling. But that is the
standard liberal media posture of harboring reverence for the U.S.
intelligence community and treating its every utterance as Truth
without the need for any corroborating evidence. It is one of their
defining attributes.

But in this case, many of them went far beyond mere regurgitation of
CIA claims. Well beyond it: here, they fabricated a claim that report
also demonstrated that the Hunter Biden laptop materials were — as
they claimed before the election — engineered by Russia. In reality,
the report did not even mention the Hunter Biden laptop materials or
allude to it, let alone claim that it was produced by the Kremlin, let
alone supply evidence that it constituted “Russian disinformation.”
But no matter: numerous journalists united to spread the false claim
far and wide that the report confirmed this storyline.

The first journalist to publish the falsehood was Patrick Tucker, an
editor at the journal Defense One. The tweet quickly went viral as
liberals clicked “retweet” and “like” so fast that at least several of
them likely suffered digital cartilage damage or at least a mild
sprain:

The claim that this report corroborated Russian involvement in the
Hunter laptop story picked up significant steam when MSNBC host Chris
Hayes endorsed it to his 2.3 million followers:

>From there, the claim was further spread by Hayes’ NBC News colleague
Ben Collins, who — ironically — works in what the network calls the
“disinformation unit,” combatting the spread of disinformation (by
which Collins means tattling on 4Chan teenagers and Facebook boomers,
while never challenging the lies of real power centers such as those
from the intelligence community; those lies are ones he amplifies):

With this MSNBC host and the NBC disinformation agent on board, it was
off to the races. Journalists from across the corporate media sphere
spread this lie over and over. Here was CNN’s Asha Rangappa:

Perhaps the most embarrassing example was from S.V. Daté, the White
House correspondent of HuffPost which, just last week, had dozens of
its reporters laid off perhaps because, while they have numerous
talented reporters, this is the sort of thing they routinely do,
causing them to lose trust among the public. Daté did not just repeat
the lie but used it to mock those who actually did the reporting on
these documents (note that the section he underlined in red says
nothing about the Hunter Biden documents, nor does it say anything
about Russia other than it “amplified” various news stories):

    Hey, New York Post and everyone else who got suckered into the
ridiculous Hunter Biden Laptop story.

    Take a bow. pic.twitter.com/H8mHZs1ij6
    — S.V. Dáte (@svdate) March 16, 2021

As this false claim went massively viral, conservative journalists —
and only they — began vocally objecting that the report made no
mention whatsoever of the Hunter Biden laptop, let alone supplied
proof for this claim. That is because, with a few noble exceptions
(such as The Washington Post’s media critic Erik Wemple), liberal
journalists at corporate outlets will eagerly endorse but never
denounce or correct each other’s falsehoods. For that reason, if you
confine yourself to the liberal corporate media bubble, and refuse to
follow conservative journalists as well, you will be propagandized and
deceived.

Hayes, to his credit, was one of the only journalists who helped
spread this falsehood and then quickly retracted it. He first
acknowledged that, upon reading the report, it did not appear that it
actually made any reference to the Hunter laptop, and then announced
he would delete his original tweet, conceding that the original claim
was false. Note how the original false claims go mega-viral, while the
tweets which subsequently acknowledge their falsity are seen by very
few people:

With one of his earliest boosters having jumped ship, Tucker himself,
the originator of this lie, first began backtracking while vowing he
would never delete the tweet, only to then relent and delete it,
acknowledging its falsity. Again compare the meager audience that
learns of the backtracking and acknowledgment of falsity compared to
the huge number exposed to the original false claim:

    I've deleted a tweet that suggested that a recent ODNI report made
explicit reference to the Hunter Biden laptop story. It makes
reference to Andrii Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who
was trafficking information remarkably similar to what showed up in
the Post report
    — Patrick Tucker (@DefTechPat) March 16, 2021

Thanks to multiple journalists with large platforms spreading Tucker’s
original false tweet, it received thousands upon thousands of likes
and re-tweets. So, too, did the tweets of other journalists promoting
that false claim, such as the one from HuffPost’s White House
Correspondent, and this one from one of David Brock’s goons
specifically claiming that the security state’s evidence-free report
somehow proves that my pre-election reporting on it was wrong. Yet
Tucker’s announcement that he was deleting his tweet on the ground
that the report does not make “explicit reference to the Hunter Biden
laptop story” has a grand total of three retweets.

Indeed, other than Hayes, it is difficult to find a journalist who
acknowledged that what they spread was a lie. Both CNN’s Rangappa and
NBC News’ Collins simply allowed the tweet to quietly disappear from
their timeline when Tucker finally deleted his, saying nothing to the
thousands or tens of thousands of people they misled. Meanwhile, the
tweet from HuffPost’s Daté is still up a full twenty-four hours after
the key journalists who spread this have acknowledged it was false.

Do you see how they behave? Take a look. Prior to the election, out of
desperation to ensure that Biden won, they censored and maligned this
reporting by mindlessly endorsing an assertion from life-long CIA
operatives that never had any evidence: ignore these documents; they
are Russian disinformation. They not only invoked that claim to
justify ignoring the story but also to successfully agitate for its
censorship by Twitter and Facebook. So they spent weeks spreading an
utter lie in order to help the candidate that they favored win the
election. Remember, these are journalists doing that.

Then, yesterday, the intelligence community issued a report that does
not even purport to contain any evidence: just assertions. And they
all jumped to treat it as gospel: no questioning of it, no skepticism,
no demands to see evidence for it, not even any notation that no
evidence was provided. They just instantly enshrined claims from the
CIA and NSA as Truth. How can you possibly be a journalist with even
minimal knowledge of what these agencies do and look in the mirror as
you do this?

But so much worse, in this case, they just outright lied about what
the report said — just fabricated assertions that the report did not
even allude to, in order to declare their lies from last October to be
vindicated. Even if this report had asserted that the Hunter Biden
laptop materials were manufactured by the Kremlin, that would prove
nothing. Evidence-free assertions from the U.S. intelligence community
merit skepticism, not blind faith — especially from people calling
themselves journalists.

But the report did not even claim that. And when some of them realized
this, they did virtually nothing to rectify the severe disinformation
they had spent the day spreading. These are the people who claim to be
so profoundly opposed to conspiracy theories and devoted to combating
“disinformation”; as usual, they are the ones who spread
disinformation most recklessly and frequently.

The fact that the false tweet from HuffPost’s White House
correspondent is still up is quite revealing, given that that outlet
just had to lay off a significant portion of its staff. As newly
arrived Substack writer Michael Tracey wrote in his first article on
this platform (headlined: “Why Journalists Hate Substack”),
journalists are very good at lamenting when their outlets are forced
to lay off journalists but very poor at examining whether the content
their outlet is producing may be part of why it is failing:

    So when you see another round of layoffs, followed by another
round of exasperated Twitter lamentation about how horrible the
industry is, you have to wonder if these rituals ultimately function
as an excuse for journalists to forgo any kind of real
self-examination. For instance, why it is that the media organizations
they inhabit always seem to be in a constant state of free-fall? Sure,
there are economic factors at play that the journalists themselves
cannot control. But it would seem to behoove these journalists to
maybe spend a little bit less time complaining in the abstract about
the depredations of “the industry”—as though they are its hapless,
beleaguered casualties—and a little bit more time analyzing whether
they have contributed to the indisputable reality that huge
cross-sections of the public distrust and despise the media.

    There are multiple potential explanations for this dynamic worth
considering. Maybe it’s the tedious hyper-partisanship and weirdly
outdated content aggregation tactics that much of the online media
still employs. Maybe it’s the constant five-alarm-fire tone and
incessant hyping of overblown threats that was characteristic of the
Trump years. Maybe it’s some combination of all these and more—but you
won’t see many axed journalists offering up any kind of critical
introspection, because when the layoffs arrive it can never have
anything to do with their own ideological myopia or other
shortcomings.

Indeed, when anyone, including journalists, loses their job, it is
lamentable. But when one witnesses behavior like what these
journalists did yesterday, the only confounding part of the collapse
of this part of the media industry is that it is not happening even
more quickly and severely.