Blah, blah and more blah.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/6/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm not sure I agree with all of the points he makes.
MiriamThe Media’s Obsession With Personalities
November 5, 2019
Roger Stone is playing a key role in the Democrats’ attempt to revive the
discredited “collusion” story, writes Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Jury selection began Tuesday in Washington in the trial of political
operative Roger Stone on charges of obstructing justice and lying to
Congress. But instead of focusing on those narrow charges, the corporate
media is trying to make this about Stone’s personality while attempting to
revive the discredited allegation of collusion between the Trump campaign
and Russia.
The media has a long history of putting personality above facts. Judgement
should be reserved to what people say and what they do. Instead we’ve seen
character assassination of many people, including imprisoned WikiLeaks
publisher Julian Assange, rather than a truthful examination of his actions
and the dangerous charges against him for practicing journalism. There is
the same obsession with the personalities of Donald Trump and Vladimir
Putin, for instance, rather than objectively examining their actions,
particularly on foreign policy. In the same way, Barack Obama’s personality
was elevated to cover up for his foreign policy disasters in Syria, Libya,
Ukraine, and Yemen and in building tensions with Russia.
Stone on his way to court in February. (Victoria Pickering/Flickr.)
Now Stone, by all appearances a sleazy operative in a town full of sleazy
operatives for both parties, is portrayed by The New York Times as a
“swashbuckling and abrasive political trickster for decades” and “eccentric
and flamboyant.” Stone is still innocent until proven otherwise. It’s
becoming harder to find, but serious reporting about a person on trial
would
ditch the adjectives.
The reporting on Stone has little to do with the actual charges against
him,
but rather serves the purpose of reviving a narrative the media falsely
pushed for two years: that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to turn
the 2016 election.
Newsweek reported Tuesday:
“Stone, 67, is at the center of the question of whether the Trump campaign
conspired or cooperated with WikiLeaks or Russia to leak stolen emails from
the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the
2016 election.”
At least The New York Times admitted,
“Mr. Mueller’s investigation found insufficient evidence to charge anyone
tied to the Trump campaign with criminally conspiring with WikiLeaks or the
Russians to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. But as documents
released last week by the Justice Department underscore, Trump campaign
aides were elated when WikiLeaks began publishing emails that the Russians
stole from Democrats.”
Of course they were elated as any campaign would be if such damaging, and
true, information came out about its opponent. Is elation now a crime?
The Democrats’ and the media’s allegation against Stone, though it is not
in
his indictment, is that he somehow knew about coming WikiLeaks releases and
told Trump about them. Even if he did, is it a crime if he had nothing to
do
with obtaining the emails? Stone knew about the coming WikiLeaks releases
because Assange had already announced they were coming. The Times reported:
“Mr. Stone later insisted that he never had any inside information from
WikiLeaks, and his claims were simply ‘posture, bluff and hype.’”
The Only Russiagate Crime
Assange in 2014, while in the Ecuadorian Embassy. (Cancillería del Ecuador,
CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Aside from the technical charges against Stone on lying and obstructing
justice regarding his alleged efforts to learn what WikiLeaks was preparing
to release, the only crime in this whole story is the stealing of the DNC
and Podesta emails. It has never been proven in court who did it, and
probably never will, despite the Times and other corporate media saying
flatly that Russia did it.
Earlier in Stone’s legal process his lawyers filed a motion to try to prove
that Russia did not hack the DNC and Podesta emails. The motion revealed
that CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC and Clinton
campaign, never completed its report, and only gave a redacted draft to the
FBI blaming Russia. The FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC server
itself.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter if it were a hack or a leak by an
insider. That’s because the emails WikiLeaks released were accurate. When
documents check out it is irrelevant who the source is. That’s why
WikiLeaks
set up an anonymous drop box, copied by big media like The Wall Street
Journal and others. Had the emails been counterfeit and disinformation was
inserted into a U.S. election by a foreign power that would be sabotage.
But
that is not what happened.
The attempt to stir up the thoroughly discredited charge of collusion
appears to be part of the defense strategy of those whose reputations were
thoroughly discredited by maniacally pushing that false charge for more
than
two years. This includes legions of journalists. But principal among them
are intelligence agency officials who laundered this “collusion”
disinformation campaign through the mainstream media.
Faced now with a criminal investigation into how the Russiagate conspiracy
theory originated intelligence officers and their accomplices in the media
and in the Democratic Party are mounting a defense by launching an
offensive
in the form of impeachment proceedings against Trump that is based on an
allegation of conducting routine, corrupt U.S. foreign policy.
Stone may be just a footnote to this historic partisan battle that may scar
the nation for a generation. But he has the personality to be the poster
boy
for the Democrats’ lost cause.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent
for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and
numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at
joelauria@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
and followed on Twitter @unjoe .
