Are NBC and CNN Paying Off Top Spies Who Leaked Info With On-Air Jobs?
News of the News: How the ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ sausage gets made
By Lee Smith
Excerpts:
CNN has never disclosed the close relationship between Evan Perez, one of the reporters on the Jan. 10, 2017 story, and his former Wall Street Journal colleagues who went on to start Fusion GPS, including the company’s founder Glenn Simpson. Nor did the Merriman Smith prize committee acknowledge how the dossier on which the leading lights of the news business have again staked their institutional credibility was disseminated to the public.
That story is now coming into focus with the recent release of seven government documents that together detail a working partnership between spy agencies and the press that helped a political attack meme go viral, even though the evidence on which it was based was demonstrably false. While this type of relationship—let’s call it collusion—may be routine in Third World countries, it does not bode well for the health of the American press, or our democratic institutions.
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Since then, thousands of articles on the Trump-Russia collusion story have taken CNN’s original story as the model for a new kind of American journalism, spoon-fed to a pliant digital press by cabals of political operatives and ex-spooks. Lies, innuendo, wild conspiracy theorizing, and the insistent assumption of guilt have replaced old-fashioned rules of sourcing, objectivity, and basic plausibility.While the social cost of this radical departure from these century-old norms is likely to be high, it has acquired two main forms of justification, the twin pillars of the new press.
The first reason, popular on both the left and among the Never Trump coterie on the right, is the assertion that Trump is a dangerous fascist who is on the verge of overthrowing the rule of law in America, an emergency that, if real, might indeed call for extreme measures, like throwing the principles of evidence-based reporting out the window. The problem with this argument being that however obvious and galling the man’s flaws are, no evidence for the thesis that Donald Trump intends to do away with Congress and the courts and rule by his own Trumpian fiat exists, at least not on planet earth. The assertion that such evidence does exist is the province of lunatics, and of people who find it useful to goose them on social media, or take their money.
The second reason for the departures from legal, institutional, and procedural norms that propagating a conspiracy theory requires is far more troubling. The lies and misinformation spoon-fed to the press by former high intelligence officials, who are now cashing paychecks from the same news outlets that they partnered with, are part of an ongoing campaign which, if successful, will protect those ex-spy chiefs from the legal consequences of their own law-breaking while in office.
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If it’s hard to see how the press is going to find its way out of this hole, that’s because the news industry has collectively decided to keep digging. The 2018 Pulitzer for National Reporting wasn’t awarded to a single story, or an individual reporter, or one newspaper’s investigative team. Uniquely, it went to the staffs of America’s two biggest newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post. The citation congratulates them “for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
In other words, the Pulitzer committee rewarded the industry as a whole for its work on the Trump-Russia collusion story.
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While it is difficult even for partisans to retail the literal version of the collusion thesis with a straight face, some version of that narrative, however qualified, or figurative, has to be true—or else the Times, like the Post, CNN, NBC, and countless other media organizations have printed thousands of stories and editorials whose underlying premise is simply false, sending the reputations of dozens of reporters and opinionators up in smoke, Pulitzer Prizes and all.
It’s hard to imagine anything worse for a democracy than journalists coordinating with political operatives and spies who are paid by the press to leak information about American citizens. But that’s where we are. We have hit rock-bottom. |
