{"id":1001065,"date":"2023-02-22T04:56:41","date_gmt":"2023-02-22T04:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.projectcensored.org\/?p=27667"},"modified":"2023-02-22T04:56:41","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T04:56:41","slug":"from-russiagate-with-love-corporate-media-spin-and-revisionist-reporting-on-russias-alleged-meddling-in-the-2016-election-continue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/02\/22\/from-russiagate-with-love-corporate-media-spin-and-revisionist-reporting-on-russias-alleged-meddling-in-the-2016-election-continue\/","title":{"rendered":"From Russiagate with Love: Corporate Media Spin and Revisionist Reporting on Russia\u2019s Alleged Meddling in the 2016 Election Continue"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nolan Higdon<\/a><\/span> and Mickey Huff<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A January 2023 publication from the Columbia Journalism Review<\/span><\/a> (CJR) spawned the latest round of spin<\/span><\/a> and shifting baseline<\/span><\/a>s from Russiagate apologists. Russiagate refers to the claims that Russia meddled in and influenced the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016, had direct connections to Donald Trump and his associates, and worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton for the presidency. A recent article from Columbia University\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism, written by investigative reporter Jeff Gerth, <\/span>utilized exiting media reports, and \u201cdozens of people at the center of the story\u2014editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit,\u201d to conclude that <\/span>the legacy news media inaccurately covered the connection between Russia and Donald J. Trump during his Presidency. While this may be news to some diehard Democrats and their allies in the \u201cliberal\u201d press, the media\u2019s reporting failures<\/span><\/a> on the matter were not missed by all.<\/p>\n

In addition to concluding Russiagate was a failure of the Fourth Estate, Gerth\u2019s report reveals that rather than reckoning with their failures, many in the news media continue to avoid the topic altogether. Gerth<\/span><\/a> explained that \u201cmy final concern, and frustration, was the lack of transparency by media organizations in responding to my questions. I reached out to more than sixty journalists; only about half responded.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The authors of this article know firsthand how badly some outlets want to memory-hole media failures surrounding Russiagate. Just this year, we had an editor of a prominent online news site (where we have been published many times) refuse to publish one of our articles<\/span><\/a> because it rightly pointed out, inconveniently, that journalists Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were accurate on many aspects of the Russiagate narrative, despite other criticisms and attacks the corporate media and the left have heaped upon them.<\/p>\n

One of the most egregious responses to the additional revelations published by CJR about the collapse of Russiagate came from Andrew Prokop<\/a> of Vox<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/i><\/span> <\/i>Prokop misused the concept of \u201crevisionism\u201d to claim that Russiagate \u201cdeniers\u201d (whom he primarily identified as Gerth, Greenwald, and Taibbi) were spreading a \u201crevisionist history<\/span><\/a>\u201d about the news media reports on Trump and Russia. To set up his faulty argument, Prokop had no choice but to admit that the\u00a0\u201cTrump as Manchurian candidate<\/span><\/a>\u201d theories, and \u201canything based on the\u00a0Steele dossier<\/span><\/a> (the opposition research report on Trump that engendered much of the Russiagate speculation),\u201d \u201chave not aged well,\u201d especially the infamous \u201cpee tape<\/span><\/a>\u201d \u2013 a story claiming that Russia was blackmailing Trump with a recording of sex workers urinating on Trump. However, from there the article is an exercise in projection, straw-person arguments, cherry-picking, and shooting the messengers. While Prokop rightfully acknowledges some reporting errors in the past, he engages in revisionism of his own while moving the goalposts on the overall claims regarding Russia, Trump, the 2016 election, and the aftermath.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Prokop creates a straw person argument by falsely claiming that critics ignore the origin of Russiagate so they can blame it all on Hillary Clinton<\/span><\/a>. In fact, the very people Prokop refers to as \u201cdeniers\u201d have confirmed the very same stories Prokop cites as the actual origin of Russigate: the social media<\/span><\/a> posts from Russian sources, Trump\u2019s personal attorney\u2019s contacting the Russian government regarding a Trump Tower<\/span><\/a> project in Moscow, and the Trump campaign\u2019s decision to share publicly available polling data<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> as well as their interest in hacked Democratic emails<\/span><\/a> and \u201cdirt<\/span><\/a>,<\/span>\u201d on then candidate Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

In addition to misrepresenting Russiagate critics\u2019 arguments, Prokop<\/span><\/a> engages in an act of projection by accusing them of rewriting history. <\/span>Citing a claim made by the U.S. Government in their indictment<\/span><\/a> of individuals suspected of hacking emails from the <\/span>Democratic National Committee\u2019s<\/span> [DNC] <\/span>server<\/span>, Prokop<\/span><\/a> concludes that we know \u201c<\/span>the Russian government really did intervene in the 2016 election by hacking leading Democrats\u2019 emails and having them leaked\u201d to WikiLeaks<\/span>. However, Prokop ignores a later declassified interview revealing that Crowdstrike<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>the American cybersecurity technology company that <\/span>the government credits with proving that Russia hacked the DNC emails, admitted, under oath, to the House of Representatives\u2019 Permentant Select Committee on Intelligence that <\/span>\u201cwe did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated (moved electronically) from the DNC [server].\u201d Instead, all they had was \u201cindicators.\u201d <\/span>Indeed, Crowdstrike<\/span><\/a> reiterated this point on their website noting that they do not have “concrete evidence” that anyone <\/span>\u201cexfiltrated data and emails from the DNC network<\/span>.\u201d<\/span> This indicates that any claim that Russia hacked the emails is infact doubtful if not baseless according to the available evidence, and far from as certain as Prokop would lead readers to believe.<\/span> Indeed, several scholars<\/span><\/a>, including the two of us and others at the media watchdog Project Censored, have acknowledged that Russia did in fact interfere, but with little discernable impact<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Worse, Prokop\u2019s inaccurate historical narrative<\/span><\/a> assumes that the Russiagate nonsense stopped with the Steele Dossier and Manchurian candidate narratives in 2016, and any other questionable stories or narratives were responsibly<\/i> introduced by the news media, but may have worked to create a misleading narrative. He explains this conclusion by noting \u201cmedia coverage that is accurate and even arguably justified can create an unfair or misleading narrative, due less to the facts than to proportion, hype, tone, and implication.\u201d This is the real attempt at revisionist history, from the legacy press and their apologists who keep spinning the story, and the root of a larger problem. Censoring those who challenged that narrative not for ideological reasons, but for journalistic ones.<\/p>\n

First, media companies actively tried to censor authors criticizing Russiagate. Taibbi noted that there were attempts by Rolling Stone<\/i><\/span><\/a> <\/i>to stymie his Russian criticism. Indeed, Taibbi and Greenwald, both of whom had consistently appeared in major news media outlets, stopped being invited as guests once they questioned the Russiagate narrative. We even experienced this firsthand as in 2018, <\/span>we had to fight to even raise legitimate questions about Russiagate for a writing project with one of our publishers. Among the liberal class, even asking basic questions about the evil Trump\/Putin axis was akin to heresy (and just for the record, we oppose them both).<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, while Prokop fairly mentions that some major media outlets debunked a few Russiagate stories, he ignores the litany of false or baseless<\/i> stories the legacy news media propounded and perpetuated long after the election. These include, but are not limited to:<\/p>\n