The Steele Dossier Story Collapses Because We Failed to Learn the Lesson of Iraq’s WMD.

At Breaking Points, hosted by Saagar and Krystal, Glenn Greenwald explains the early warning signs that the Steele Dossier was fraudulent: 1) It was regurgitated cold war/McCarthyism BS, and 2) the narrative was supported only by anonymous sources touted by the spy state. Now we know the Steele Dossier was absolute bullshit concocted by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and that it went far and wide thanks to a credulous "news media," leading to the Mueller investigation.

The same news media outlets that enthusiastically pushed the Steele Dossier and all the subsequent Trump-Russian connection falsehoods have almost entirely been silent given the blockbuster news that they were pushing major falsehood for several years and that these falsehoods likely affected the way many people voted in national elections. As Greenwald notes, the legacy news media does not care that it got things so wrong, which is evidence that they were intentionally misleading their audience. This conversation begins at about the 1:20:00 mark:

At least after the WMD fiasco, the NYT (which led the charge for the Iraq invasion (e.g., Judith Miller and Thomas Friedman) repented by acknowledging that many NYT articles regarding WMD were poorly researched and that they should not have printed.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ''regime change'' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.

. . . We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.

The new version of the NYT has not learned any of the lessons from the WMD disaster. The now well-recognized collapse of the Steele Dossier is damning information regarding the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the news media.  The left leaning legacy media at out of the hands of the U.S. spy state, failing to track down real information. They wanted to believe the Trump-Russia connection and that was good enough for printing stories they failed to vet.

I resisted using the term "fake news" when I first heard the phrase, but there is no getting around the fact that the left-leaning legacy media engaged in journalism malpractice--fake news--regarding most, if not all--Trump Russia stories that it produced.

Do I need to add that I despise Donald Trump? Even since he appeared on the political stage I have found him arrogant, narcissistic, corrupt and incompetent. I voted for two severely compromised candidates, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden because I concluded that they were far less dangerous than Trump.

Continue ReadingThe Steele Dossier Story Collapses Because We Failed to Learn the Lesson of Iraq’s WMD.

Left Leaning Legacy Media Belatedly and Grudgingly Acknowledge that the Steele Dossier was Fraudulent

How does it feel to now know that left-leaning legacy news media duped you for years on Trump-Russia? Drew Holden offers chapter and verse below, and there are oh so many offenders, including Rachel Maddow, her "reporter" pals at CNN and many many others. This is merely one story of many where the two media teams (the Democrat team and the Republican team) tell you only what they want you to know (and withhold what they don't want you to know). There was plenty of reason to be suspicious about the Steele Dossier before this recent indictment. This widespread journalistic malpractice re Trump-Russia went on for years.

As Glenn Greenwald notes in a related tweet: "NYT & WashPost showered themselves with Pulitzers for their monomaniacal obsession with Russiagate. Even after Mueller admitted he could find no evidence to establish the conspiracy and indicted *nobody* for it, they persisted." But there is a bigger lesson here that pertains to all of us and our failing democracy: consumers of "news" are not getting what they think they are getting. Many of them, including many who will bristle as they read this post, have been as credulous as the CNN reporters.

[[Added Nov 7, 2021]

Greenwald is correct to hammer this story over and over. The media is the only industry specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Without accurate information our Democracy is a sham, an opportunity for tyrants and their sycophants to run the U.S. without regard to the needs and desires of the People. If we are happy with that dysfunction, then we should cancel the Fourth of July because the 1776 revolt from England would be then reduced to a mere exercise in power, not the beginning of an amazing real-life experiment in democracy. One last thing for now: I entirely agree with Greenwald that if the left-leaning legacy media had a conscience, if it were serving the higher purpose that it is pretending to serve, it would prominently acknowledge the false information it published and it would publicly explain the steps it is taking to make sure that this sort of thing does not ever occur again. The worst offending media outlets are refusing to do that in the case of the Steele Dossier, which is strong evidence that it will be business as usual as we approach the next round of elections. What follows is Greenwald's most recent thread on this topic. I wish I could argue with Greenwald on the facts he notes and his conclusions, because they constitute an strong indictment that our system of government/media has largely become manipulative theater, not the ingenious and innovative system for serving the People that many of us learned in civics classes decades ago.

One more excerpt worth repeating:

One key point I omitted: no discussion of the Russiagate fraud and the media's role is complete without highlighting their key partners in all of this: the security state services (CIA/FBI/NSA/DOJ). The most under-discussed media story of this decade is how they all but merged.

Continue ReadingLeft Leaning Legacy Media Belatedly and Grudgingly Acknowledge that the Steele Dossier was Fraudulent

Modern Journalism’s Task: Protecting Us From the Facts

Katie Couric now admits that she censored Ruth Bader Ginsburg's comments regarding kneeling during the national anthem to "protect" RGB. Here is an excerpt from the NY Post:

Couric, being a “big RBG fan” and feeling protective of her and the controversy the comments would likely embroil her in, wrote in the book that she “lost a lot of sleep” and felt extremely “conflicted” over deciding whether she should include Ginsburg’s full thoughts on the matter.

In her new book Couric claims that she withheld the full quote (which would have been highly newsworthy) because RBG “was elderly and probably didn’t understand the question.”

What did RBG actually say in 2016? Here are a few screen shots from the New York Post:

Note that for Couric, RBG was too old to understand Couric's question but not too old to serve as a high-functioning Justice on the Supreme Court.

Here's what is really going on: RBG's statement simply didn't fit the preconceived media narrative Couric was serving up. That was the real problem.  Modern journalism is both what they tell you and what they withhold from you. They are not content to tell you facts so that you can think for yourself. They want to tell you how to think and they do this by misleading you.

BTW, this is not the first left-leaning institution that refused to accurately report the words of their hero, RGB.  Remember what the ACLU recently did? 

Continue ReadingModern Journalism’s Task: Protecting Us From the Facts

Questioning the NYT COVID Narrative

Glenn Greenwald offers Jeremy Beckham's look at the official NYT COVID narrative. That NYT narrative tries to make the case that COVID vaccine resistance is largely a politically partisan problem and that Trump voters are the villains. An excerpt:

The corporate media has worked very hard to propagate the liberal-pleasing narrative that COVID has become a partisan disease due to vaccine hesitancy on the right, often ignoring the inconvenient truth that large percentages of politically diverse groups, principally African-Americans and Latinos, remain resistant to vaccination. Recent reporting from The New York Times serves to further this distorted narrative, dubbing the positive correlation between support for Donald Trump and COVID death rates “Red COVID," and brandishing it as evidence of a partisan pandemic. But the Times’ report misleads readers through statistical manipulation and data games, as illustrated by this meticulous analysis, presented in an Outside Voices contribution by Jeremy Beckham . . .

Continue ReadingQuestioning the NYT COVID Narrative

“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

Matt Taibbi explains that the modern version of "news" is religion. All honest people know this. That is why so many smart people of all political persuasions lament that there is far too much "fake news," many of them telling me that they now longer watch "the news." Taibbi's article: "The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War - When political narrative replaces faith, truth becomes heresy." Here's an excerpt:

News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

BTW, check out the video in Taibbi's article for a reminder of how networks used to report the news.

Continue Reading“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions