RussiaGate as Organized Distraction
July 29, 2019
Oliver Boyd-Barrett looks at who benefits from having the corporate media
suffocate their public with a puerile narrative for over two years.
By Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Organisation for Propaganda Studies
For over two years RussiaGate has accounted for a substantial proportion of
all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have
significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The
timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded
environmental protections, jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated
tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.
In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from
global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the
further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by
historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic
greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of
alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
MSNBC news host Rachel Maddow schooling viewers.
The RussiaGate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It
presumes that the U.S. electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust
and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. democratic
system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated by
the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is
ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist
domination. Problems with the U.S. electoral system and media are extensive
and well documented.
U.S. electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an Electoral College
that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of
electoral districts has been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of
electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable
corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations
reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from
minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive
voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the
voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or
people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not
voted in previous elections). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted
when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through
regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their
successors. Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in
the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the
U.S. "democratic" system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy
ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous "dark"
money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside
the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) electoral
campaigns.
Free and Open Exchange of Ideas
Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications
infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas. No such
infrastructure exists. Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small
number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at
the very heart of U.S. oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising
revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.
The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that
can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the
shackles of U.S. plutocratic self-regard is also well documented. Recent
U.S. media coverage of the U.S.-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in
point.
(Book Catalog/Flickr)
The much-celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The
principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized
than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate
advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell
to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent
AI-assisted micro-targeting during "persuasion" campaigns. Like their legacy
counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are
vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance
establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an
outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by
companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as - but by no
means limited to - the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent
SCL.
Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense
to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media
activities of, say, Russia's Internet Research Agency.
Russian Contacts Deplored
Trump and Putin at a working lunch, July 16, 2018 (White House/ Shealah
Craighead)
Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated,
problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems. Moreover, in a
climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, RussiaGate further presupposes
that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in
itself deplorable. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to
communication between ruling oligarchs of both the U.S. and Russia, however,
the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the
benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world,
identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for
peaceful relations. A real politick analysis might advise the insertion of
wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to
the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has
long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.
Even if we address RussiaGate as a problem worthy of our attention, the
evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictments and investigations
implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no
connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential campaign. In some other
instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his
investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that
are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.
Robert Mueller at July 24, 2019, congressional hearing.
The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely
problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the "Steele
dossier" by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of
interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or
another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele's company, Orbis, was
commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted
by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of
earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British
intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning
conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton
emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian
spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the
Trump campaign.
There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo
Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who
had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an
attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial,
not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and
accusations against Russia.
The most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the
Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a
small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and
NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking
of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer
2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.
Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of
faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the
problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is
also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than
hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that
the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact
been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton's
private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public
positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred
narrative of Russian villainy.
Who Benefits?
Why then does the RussiaGate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?
RussiaGate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party,
whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016
election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S.
industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years,
through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to
undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin's leadership, dismember Russia
and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital)
and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic
struggle for the heart of EurAsia.
In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his
campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term
strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.
While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of
Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a
well-chronicled history of U.S. "meddling" in the elections and politics of
nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has
included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in
addition to numerous instances of "color revolution" strategies involving
the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently
coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).
A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a
narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal
imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both
Trump's plaintive wailing about "fake news" whenever mainstream media
coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of
their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have
called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.
Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and
what are often partisan "fact-checkers" (illustrated by Facebook financial
support for and dependence on the pro-NATO "think tank," the Atlantic
Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information
organizations in the arena of social media whose only "sin" is analysis and
opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.
The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to
insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism. Given these heavy handed and
censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the
RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope
now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed
for democracy.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett is professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University.
He is author of "RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of
Social Media" London and New York (Routledge).
An earlier version of this article was published by the Organisation for
Propaganda Studies.
