I have not been following the details reported in the media of the Mueller investigation, finding it to be largely speculative and short of facts. Matt Taibbi has an exhaustive analysis of how the media got the Trump-Russia story so horribly wrong that it ended up enabling Trump to take a victory lap that will last forever. The fact that all we have seen is the summary provided by the attorney general that said that Mueller could not completely exonerate Trump will be ignored, and the fact that no further indictments were issued will be highlighted by Trump. By hyping the Russia collusion angle so heavily on the basis of so little hard evidence, Taibbi says that this is the biggest US media debacle since the Iraq WMD story, though that had far worse human costs.
A few short excerpts would not do justice to the article that needs to be read in full. He says that the basic problem was that many in the media were carried away by anti-Russian fervor and published highly speculative stories based on dubious sources without due diligence.
Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.
…Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base.
…This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.
That’s been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.
This is a major structural flaw of the new fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.
…With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially said the Russian traded sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to undermine democracy, a “real-life Red Sparrow,” as ABC put it.
But a judge threw out the sex charge after “five minutes” when it turned out to be based on a single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina’s car for inspection.
It’s pretty hard to undo public perception you’re a prostitute once it’s been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like “Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan” online in the New York Times.
…Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that route?
…A lot of #Russiagate coverage became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called “connecting the dots.” This was allowed because the press committed to a collusion narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that would never be permitted in normal times.
…We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on Trump and Russia.
Tom Tomorrow tells us what we can now look forward to until the end of the Trump presidency and possibly beyond.
Taibbi is mostly right.
I was horrified when Mueller (who whitewashed the CIA torture program) was put in charge of an investigation into Trump. As I expected, he threw a few people under the bus to lubricate its undercarriage but they were probably useless idiots who had served their purpose and nobody cared.
The real point of the exercise, as Alexandria Occasio-Cortez says, is that the republicans have revealed themselves to be interested in only power. They are unafraid to do whatever it takes -- anything -- and they’ll maybe bother to make some sanctimonious noises about it, but probably not even that. It’s clear, from watching what is happening right now in Florida and what happened in Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, that we are in a civil war -- it’s just a cold war, so far. The republicans have realized that they’re going to lose if they play fair (which they have only ever pretended to do) so the pretences are getting thinner and thinner.
We ought to declare war to the death on the two party system -- bring in waves of new voters in both parties and get the gerontocrats pried out of office, if that can be done without them pulling the building down on us all. Personally, I don’t think it can be done; it’s impossible to see Nancy Pelosi’s maneuvers to disempower her democratic challengers and her vacuous statements about bipartisanship as anything other than “collusion” with the enemy. The whole system needs to be burned to the ground and the party elites of both parties are a threat to human survival -- they keep nattering on about Mueller this and Trump that while they keep pumping the oil and preparing their bomb shelters. They don’t care because they’re already old and don’t mind dying -- the capitalists’ last laugh.
Fuck the Russians, it’s the two party system that is screwing everyone, and they’re doing it at the behest of the fat cats who expect to profit from the rubble.
PS -- do you remember this? “A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media”
It’s pretty much spot on. Kovalev correctly predicts that the media will be lured into haring off after clouds of pointless bullshit. Enjoy the chase, lads.
Marcus, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
You mob have your electoral college and first past the post, and no realistic expectation of changing either.
(Yeah, I know you know you don’t really have a legit democracy, you have a “democracy”)
[erratum]
Wow, I really bolloxed that link. Try again: Duverger’s law
I think any trust that an average citizen might have in the elite media has pretty much dissipated. US liberals who thought that the Deep State and the billionaire-owned media were going to be a genuine opposing force in the fight against Trumpism were always delusional.
It should be ignored. It’s extremely difficult for an investigation to “completely exonerate” anybody. Normally, the failure to prove wrongdoing is enough. It’s not even the job of the defence to prove somebody’s innocence.
Lol. The “reputation of the American news media” has been dead for so long, it’s not even funny any more.
No, when the press republishes spurious “intelligence” that triggers the start of two major wars that have killed over a million people and destabilised an entire region, not to mention enabling the open embrace of torture, that’s an atrocity. This is a Saturday matinee by comparison.
People find propaganda more convincing if it goes through a couple of layers of indirection.
The parallels with QAnon are striking… The difference is, one lives on 4chan and YouTube, the other in the pages of the supposed “papers of record”.
So, that’ll be “never” then…
I am tired already of hearing how Barr’s summary completely exonerates Trump, and the whole thing was a witch hunt, and Trump won the 2016 election because he ran a better campaign with better policies (This is the message being pushed by the White House at present.)
Things that actually did happen:
Russians did hack the DNC email server, and interfere in the US election by releasing info from that and by spreading fake news on social media.
The Trump Tower meeting did happen. I am waiting to read how that is not evidence of collusion.
Carter Page tried really hard to collude. I guess either he was unsuccessful, or else the Trump campaign managed to portray him as a lone wacko.
Trump on every interaction with Putin acted in a way that made him look the most guilty -- seizing his translator’s notes, allowing the Russian press but not the US press into the oval office, etc.
Trump repeated “No collusion” frequently. Maybe if he didn’t lie routinely someone might say that he had a point.
All of Robert Mueller’s indictments and plea deals in the Russia investigation
—
So no, I’m not buying the Trump apologetics line that everything was hunky dory and there was no cause to investigate.
Just to be clear, when I said “The parallels with QAnon are striking”, I was meaning the wish-fulfilment, all-of-your-political-enemies-are-about-to-go-to-jail bits. I didn’t intend to imply that the idea of Trump colluding with Russia was as fundamentally absurd as the idea of Hillary Clinton running a child sex abuse ring out of the basement of a pizzeria. (Obviously, it was Jeffrey Epstein and a private jet…)
Trump says: We Can Never, Ever Let This Happen to Another President Again.
Meanwhile, he has never admitted to being wrong nor apologized for his Obama birtherism, which questioned the loyalty, and even the citizenship, of another president. So f**k the hypocritical narcissist.
Duverger’s law doesn’t really jibe well with the actual history of FPTP systems. Canada for instance had a fairly stable four-party system (comprised of a left-wing and a right-wing party each nipping at the respective heels of two larger centre-left and centre-right parties) for several decades after WWII. Most FPTP systems have three or more viable parties in practice, whether they be Madisonian-style presidential systems or Westminster-style parliamentary ones. The hard duopoly that’s prevailed in American federal politics since the late 19th century is really sui generis.
Jussie Smollett Exonerated! No Collusion!
Ha ha ha! Of course he is joking. Trump never admits he was wrong, and never apologizes.