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.

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What Shall We Call Your Social Movement, [CRT]?

From Freddie Boer:

You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. . . . And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

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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.

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The Difference Between Information and Knowledge

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). It has been a very slow read for me because it is such a impressive and detailed analysis of what is ailing us today. Here is a major distinction that is largely unappreciated. Information is merely "stuff," whereas knowledge must be carefully earned through the use of intricate institutions that coordinate, test and refine human observations and conclusions. This excerpt is from page 125:

What the institutionalization of modern, fact-based journalism did was to create a system of nodes—professional newsrooms which can choose whether to accept information and pass it on. The reality-based community is a network of such nodes: publishers, peer reviewers, universities, agencies, courts, regulators, and many, many more. I like to imagine the system’s institutional nodes as filtering and pumping stations through which propositions flow. Each station acquires and evaluates propositions, compares them with stored knowledge, hunts for error, then filters out some propositions and distributes the survivors to other stations, which do the same.

Importantly, they form a network, not a hierarchy. No single gatekeeper can decide which hypotheses enter the system, and there are infinitely many pathways through it. . .

Suppose some mischievous demon were to hack into the control center one night and reverse the pumps and filters. Instead of straining out error, they pass it along. In fact, instead of slowing the dissemination of false and misleading claims, they accelerate it. Instead of marginalizing ad hominem attacks, they encourage them. Instead of privileging expertise, they favor amateurism. Instead of validating claims, they share claims. Instead of trafficking in communication, they traffic in display. Instead of identifying sources, they disguise them. Instead of rewarding people who persuade others, they reward those who publicize themselves. If that were how the filtering and pumping stations worked, the system would acquire a negative epistemic valence. It would actively disadvantage truth. It would be not an information technology but misinformation technology.

No one saw anything like that coming. We—I certainly include myself—expected digital technology to broaden and deepen the marketplace of ideas. There would be more hypotheses, more checkers, more access to expertise. How could that not be a leap forward for truth? At worst, we assumed, the digital ecosystem would be neutral. It might not necessarily tilt toward reality, but neither would it systematically tilt against reality.

Unfortunately, we forgot that staying in touch with reality depends on rules and institutions. We forgot that overcoming our cognitive and tribal biases depends on privileging those rules and institutions, not flattening them into featureless, formless “platforms.” In other words, we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can be simply emitted, but knowledge, the product of a rich social interaction, must be achieved. Converting information into knowledge requires getting some important incentives and design choices right. Unfortunately, digital media got them wrong.

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Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Rauch Discuss “The Constitution of Knowledge”

From Heterodox Academy, a discussion of Jonathan Rauch's excellent new book, The Constitution of Knowledge. Here's the HxA landing page for this video.

The production of knowledge thrives when universities value open inquiry, but recent trends in conformist thinking pose new threats to research, writing, and teaching. How do we combat conformist culture in our classrooms and research, while encouraging inquiry into unorthodox ideas? How can our epistemic institutions continue to seek and know truth? We were joined by HxA co-founder and Board Chair Jonathan Haidt for an in-depth discussion with Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

As Rauch states in the teaser, the system doesn't work by magic. It requires all of us to participate in good faith:

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