from The Intercept
Journalism's New Propaganda Tool: Using "Confirmed" to Mean its Opposite
Outlets claiming to have "confirmed" Jeffrey Goldberg's story about Trump's
troops comments are again abusing that vital term.
Glenn Greenwald
September 5 2020, 8:21 a.m.
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ONE OF THE MOST HUMILIATING journalism debacles of the Trump era played out
on December 8, 2017, first on CNN and then on MSNBC. The spectacle kicked
off on that Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. when CNN, deploying its most
melodramatic music and graphics designed to convey that a real bombshell was
about to be dropped, announced that anonymous sources had provided the
network with a smoking gun proving the Trump/Russia conspiracy once and for
all: during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had received a September 4
email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to
WikiLeaks' servers containing the DNC emails which the group would
subsequently release to the public ten days later. Cable news and online
media spontaneously combusted, as is their wont, in shock, hysteria and awe
over this proof that WikiLeaks and Trump were in cahoots.
CNN has ensured that no videos of the festivities are available on YouTube
for anyone to watch. That's because the claim was completely false in its
most crucial respect. CNN misreported the date of the smoking gun email
Trump, Jr. received: rather than being sent to him on September 4 - ten days
prior to WikiLeaks' public release, thus enabling secret access - the email
was merely sent by a random member of the public after the public release by
WikiLeaks (September 14), encouraging Trump, Jr. to look at those now-public
emails.
Though the original false report cannot be viewed any longer (except in
small snippets from other networks, principally Fox, discussing CNN's
debacle), one can view the cringe-inducing video of CNN's Senior
Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju explaining, after the Washington Post
debunked the story, that "we are actually correcting" the reporting, doing
his best to downplay what a massive blunder this was (though the whole thing
is fantastic, my favorite line is when Raju says, with no small amount of
understatement: "this appears to change the understanding of this story,"
followed by: "perhaps the initial understanding of what this email was,
perhaps is not as significant based on what we know now": perhaps):
The CNN page which originally published the blockbuster story contains this
rather significant correction at the top:
Washington (CNN) Correction: This story has been corrected to say the date
of the email was September 14, 2016, not September 4, 2016. The story also
changed the headline and removed a tweet from Donald Trump Jr., who posted a
message about WikiLeaks on September 4, 2016.
So mistakes happen in journalism, even huge and embarrassing ones. Other
than some petty schadenfreude, why is this worth remembering? The reason is
that that sorry episode reflects a now-common but highly corrosive tactic of
journalistic deceit.
Very shortly after CNN unveiled its false story, MSNBC's intelligence
community spokesman Ken Dilanian went on air and breathlessly announced that
he had obtained independent confirmation that the CNN story was true. In a
video segment I cannot recommend highly enough, Dilanian was introduced by
an incredibly excited Hallie Jackson - who urged Dilanian to "tell us what
we've just now learned," adding: "I know you and some of our colleagues have
confirmed some of this information: what's up?" Dilanian then proceeded to
explain what he had learned:
That's right, Hallie. Two sources with direct knowledge of this are telling
us that Congressional investigators have obtained an email from a man named
"Mike Erickson" - obviously they don't know if that's his real name -
offering Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump, Jr. access to WikiLeaks
documents. It goes to the heart of the collusion question... One of the big
questions is: did [Trump Jr.] call the FBI?
MSNBC, December 8, 2017
How could that happen? How could MSNBC purport to confirm a false story from
CNN? Shortly after, CBS News also purported to have "confirmed" the same
false story: that Trump, Jr. received advanced access to the WikiLeaks
documents. It's one thing for a news outlet to make a mistake in reporting
by, for instance, mis-reporting the date of an email and thus getting the
story completely wrong. But how is it possible that multiple other outlets
could "confirm" the same false report?
It's possible because news outlets have completely distorted the term
"confirmation" beyond all recognition. Indeed, they now use it to mean the
exact opposite of what it actually means, thereby draping themselves in
journalistic glory they have not earned and, worse, deceiving the public
into believing that an unproven assertion has, in fact, been proven. With
this disinformation method, they are doing the exact opposite of what
journalism, at its core, is supposed to do: separate fact from speculation.
CNN ultimately blamed its anonymous sources for this error, but refused to
out them by insisting that it was a somehow a good faith mistake rather than
deliberate disinformation (how did multiple "good faith" sources all
"accidentally misread" an email date in the same way? CNN, in the spirit of
news outlets refusing to provide the accountability and transparency for
themselves that they demand from others, refuses to this very day to address
that question).
But what is clear is that the "confirmation" which both MSNBC and CBS
claimed it had obtained for the story was anything but: all that happened
was that the same sources which anonymously whispered these unverified,
false claims to CNN then went and repeated the same unverified, false claims
to other outlets, which then claimed that they "independently confirmed" the
story even though they had done nothing of the sort.
IT SEEMS THE SAME MISLEADING TACTIC is now driving the supremely dumb but
all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first
reported by the Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made
disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that "four people
with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day" - whom the magazine
refuses to name because they fear "angry tweets" - told him that Trump made
these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day
(including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is
accurate.
So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former
aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story
is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg's story
based on what best advances one's political interests, how can one resolve
the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original
claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of
the story.
Other media outlets - including Associated Press and Fox News - now claim
that they did exactly that: "confirmed" the Atlantic story. But if one looks
at what they actually did, at what this "confirmation" consists of, it is
the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally
responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that "a senior Defense
Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S.
Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump's comments confirmed some of
the remarks to The Associated Press," while Fox merely said "a former senior
Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president
in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip."
In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who
claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to
other outlets and repeated the same claims - the same tactic that enabled
MSNBC and CBS to claim they had "confirmed" the fundamentally false CNN
story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or
perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and
sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the
sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to
their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.
But whatever happened, neither AP nor Fox obtained anything resembling
"confirmation." They just heard the same assertions that Goldberg heard,
likely from the same circles if not the same people, and are now abusing the
term "confirmation" to mean "unproven assertions" or "unverifiable claims"
(indeed, Fox now says that "two sources who were on the trip in question
with Trump refuted the main thesis of The Atlantic's reporting").
It should go without saying that none of this means that Trump did not utter
these remarks or ones similar to them. He has made public statements in the
past that are at least in the same universe as the ones reported by the
Atlantic, and it is quite believable that he would have said something like
this (though the absolute last person who should be trusted with anything,
particularly interpreting claims from anonymous sources, is Jeffrey
Goldberg, who has risen to one of the most important perches in journalism
despite (or, more accurately because of) one of the most disgraceful and
damaging records of spreading disinformation in service of the Pentagon and
intelligence community's agenda).
But journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is
"believable" or "seems like it could be true." Its core purpose, the only
thing that really makes it matter or have worth, is reporting what is true,
or at least what evidence reveals. And that function is completely subverted
when news outlets claim that they "confirmed" a previous report when they
did nothing more than just talked to the same people who anonymously
whispered the same things to them as were whispered to the original outlet.
Quite aside from this specific story about whether Trump loves The Troops,
conflating the crucial journalistic concept of "confirmation" with "hearing
the same idle gossip" or "unproven assertions" is a huge disservice. It is
an instrument of propaganda, not reporting. And its use has repeatedly
deceived rather than informed the public. Anyone who doubts that should
review how it is that MSNBC and CBS both claimed to have "confirmed" a CNN
report which turned out to be ludicrously and laughably false. Clearly, the
term "confirmation" has lost its meaning in journalism.
