Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
The Slimy Business of Russia-gate
September 28, 2017
Special Report: As the U.S. government doles out tens of millions of dollars
to "combat Russian propaganda," one result is a slew of new "studies" by
"scholars" and "researchers" auditioning for the loot, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The "Field of Dreams" slogan for America's NGOs should be: "If you pay for
it, we will come." And right now, tens of millions of dollars are flowing to
non-governmental organizations if they will buttress the thesis of Russian
"meddling" in the U.S. democratic process no matter how sloppy the
"research" or how absurd the "findings."
Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General
Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)
And, if you think the pillars of the U.S. mainstream media - The Washington
Post, The New York Times, CNN and others - will apply some quality controls,
you haven't been paying attention for the past year or so. The MSM is just
as unethical as the NGOs are.
So, we are now in a phase of Russia-gate in which NGO "scholars" produce
deeply biased reports and their nonsense is treated as front-page news and
items for serious discussion across the MSM.
Yet, there's even an implicit confession about how pathetic some of this
"scholarship" is in the hazy phrasing that gets applied to the "findings,"
although the weasel words will slip past most unsuspecting Americans and
will be dropped for more definitive language when the narrative is
summarized in the next day's newspaper or in a cable-news "crawl."
For example, a Times front-page story on Thursday reported that "a network
of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the
[NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem] issue with hashtags, such
as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee."
The story, which fits neatly into the current U.S. propaganda meme that the
Russian government somehow is undermining American democracy by stirring up
dissent inside the U.S., quickly spread to other news outlets and became the
latest "proof" of a Russian "war" against America.
However, before we empty the nuclear silos and exterminate life on the
planet, we might take a second to look at the Times phrasing: "a network of
Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia."
The vague wording doesn't even say the Russian government was involved but
rather presents an unsupported claim that some Twitter accounts are
"suspected" of being part of some "network" and that this "network" may have
some ill-defined connection - or "links" - to "Russia," a country of 144
million people.
'Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon'
It's like the old game of "six degrees of separation" from Kevin Bacon. Yes,
perhaps we are all "linked" to Kevin Bacon somehow but that doesn't prove
that we know Kevin Bacon or are part of a Kevin Bacon "network" that is
executing a grand conspiracy to sow discontent by taking opposite sides of
issues and then tweeting.
The New York Times building in Manhattan. (Photo credit: Robert Parry)
Yet that is the underlying absurdity of the Times article by Daisuke
Wakabayashi and Scott Shane. Still, as silly as the article may be that
doesn't mean it's not dangerous. The Times' high-profile treatment of these
gauzy allegations represents a grave danger to the world by fueling a
growing hysteria inside the United States about being "at war" with
nuclear-armed Russia. At some point, someone might begin to take this
alarmist rhetoric seriously.
Yes, I understand that lots of people hate President Trump and see
Russia-gate as the golden ticket to his impeachment. But that doesn't
justify making serious allegations with next to no proof, especially when
the outcome could be thermonuclear war.
However, with all those millions of dollars sloshing around the NGO world
and Western academia - all looking for some "study" to fund that makes
Russia look bad - you are sure to get plenty of takers. And, we should now
expect that new "findings" like these will fill in for the so-far
evidence-free suspicions about Russia and Trump colluding to steal the
presidency from Hillary Clinton.
If you read more deeply into the Times story, you get a taste of where
Russia-gate is headed next and a clue as to who is behind it:
"Since last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a
bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research
group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter accounts -
human users and suspected bots alike - they have linked to Russian influence
operations. Those were the accounts pushing the opposing messages on the
N.F.L. and the national anthem.
"Of 80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25
percent 'had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,' the researchers found.
About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton, falsely accusing her of
funding left-wing antifa - short for anti-fascist - protesters, tying her to
the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her
daughter Chelsea's use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in
the federal investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump's former
campaign chairman, with most of them treated the news as a vindication for
President Trump's earlier wiretapping claims."
The Neocons, Again!
So, let's stop and unpack this Times' reporting. First, this Alliance for
Securing Democracy is not some neutral truth-seeking organization but a
neoconservative-dominated outfit that includes on its advisory board such
neocon luminaries as Mike Chertoff, Bill Kristol and former Freedom House
president David Kramer along with other anti-Russia hardliners such as
former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former House Intelligence
Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.
Neoconservative pundit William Kristol. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
How many of these guys, do you think, were assuring us that Iraq was hiding
WMDs back in 2003?
This group clearly has an ax to grind, a record of deception, and plenty of
patrons in the Military-Industrial Complex who stand to make billions of
dollars from the New Cold War.
The neocons also have been targeting Russia for regime change for years
because they see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the chief obstacle to
their goal of helping Israel achieve its desire for "regime change" in Syria
and a chance to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran. Russia-gate has served the neocons well
as a very convenient way to pull Democrats, liberals and even progressives
into the neocon agenda because Russia-gate is sold as a powerful weapon for
the anti-Trump Resistance.
The Times article also might have mentioned that Twitter has 974 million
accounts. So, this alarm over 600 accounts is a bit disproportionate for a
front-page story in the Times, don't you think?
And, there's the definitional problem of what constitutes "anti-Americanism"
in a news article. And what does it mean to be "linked to Russian influence
operations"? Does that include Americans who may not march in lockstep to
the one-sided State Department narratives on the crises in Ukraine and
Syria? Any deviation from Official Washington's groupthink makes you a
"Moscow stooge."
And, is it a crime to be "critical" of Hillary Clinton or to note that the
U.S. mainstream media was dismissive of Trump's claims about being
wiretapped only for us to find out later that the FBI apparently was
wiretapping his campaign manager?
However, such questions aren't going to be asked amid what has become a
massive Russia-gate groupthink, dominating not just Official Washington, but
across much of America's political landscape and throughout the European
Union.
Why the Bias?
Beyond the obvious political motivations for this bias, we also have had the
introduction of vast sums of money pouring in from the U.S. government, NATO
and European institutions to support the business of "combatting Russian
propaganda."
President Obama in the Oval Office.
For example, last December, President Obama signed into law a $160 million
funding mechanism entitled the "Combating Foreign Propaganda and
Disinformation Act." But that amounts to only a drop in the bucket
considering already existing Western propaganda projects targeting Russia.
So, a scramble is on to develop seemingly academic models to "prove" what
Western authorities want proven: that Russia is at fault for pretty much
every bad thing that happens in the world, particularly the alienation of
many working-class people from the Washington-Brussels elites.
The truth cannot be that establishment policies have led to massive income
inequality and left the working class struggling to survive and thus are to
blame for ugly political manifestations - from Trump to Brexit to the
surprising support for Germany's far-right AfD party. No, it must be Russia!
Russia! Russia! And there's a lot of money on the bed to prove that point.
There's also the fact that the major Western news media is deeply invested
in bashing Russia as well as in the related contempt for Trump and his
followers. Those twin prejudices have annihilated all professional standards
that would normally be applied to news judgments regarding these flawed
"studies."
On Thursday, The Washington Post ran its own banner-headlined story drawn
from the same loose accusations made by that neocon-led Alliance for
Securing Democracy, but instead the Post sourced the claims to Sen. James
Lankford, R-Oklahoma. The headline read: "Russian trolls are stoking NFL
controversy, senator says."
The "evidence" cited by Lankford's office was one "Twitter account calling
itself Boston Antifa that gives its geolocation as Vladivostok, Russia," the
Post reported.
By Thursday, Twitter had suspended the Boston Antifa account, so I couldn't
send it a question, but earlier this month, Dan Glaun, a reporter for
Masslive.com, reported that the people behind Boston Antifa were "a pair of
anti-leftist pranksters from Oregon who started Boston Antifa as a parody of
actual anti-fascist groups."
In an email to me on Thursday, Glaun cited an interview that the Boston
Antifa pranksters had done with right-wing radio talk show host Gavin
McInnes last April.
And, by the way, there are apps that let you manipulate your geolocation
data on Twitter. Or, you can choose to believe that the highly professional
Russian intelligence agencies didn't notice that they were telegraphing
their location as Vladivostok.
Mindless Russia Bashing
Another example of this mindless Russia bashing appeared just below the
Post's story on Lankford's remarks. The Post sidebar cited a "study" from
researchers at Oxford University's Project on Computational Propaganda
asserting that "junk news" on Twitter "flowed more heavily in a dozen [U.S.]
battleground states than in the nation overall in the days immediately
before and after the 2016 presidential election, suggesting that a
coordinated effort targeted the most pivotal voters." Cue the spooky Boris
and Natasha music!
Boris and Natasha, the evil spies from the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows.
Of course, any Americans living in "battleground states" could tell you that
they are inundated with all kinds of election-related "junk," including
negative TV advertising, nasty radio messages, alarmist emails and annoying
robo-calls at dinner time. That's why they're called "battleground states,"
Sherlock.
But what's particularly offensive about this "study" is that it implies that
the powers-that-be must do more to eliminate what these "experts" deem
"propaganda" and "junk news." If you read deeper into the story, you
discover that the researchers applied a very subjective definition of what
constitutes "junk news," i.e., information that the researchers don't like
even if it is truthful and newsworthy.
The Post article by Craig Timberg, who apparently is using Russia-gate to
work himself off the business pages and onto the national staff, states that
"The researchers defined junk news as 'propaganda and ideologically extreme,
hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political news and information.'
"The researchers also categorized reports from Russia and ones from
WikiLeaks - which published embarrassing posts about Democrat Hillary
Clinton based on a hack of her campaign chairman's emails - as 'polarizing
political content' for the purpose of the analysis."
So, this "study" lumped together "junk news" with accurate and newsworthy
information, i.e., WikiLeaks' disclosure of genuine emails that contained
such valid news as the contents of Clinton's speeches to Wall Street banks
(which she was trying to hide from voters) as well as evidence of the
unethical tactics used by the Democratic National Committee to sabotage Sen.
Bernie Sanders's campaign.
Also dumped into the researchers' bin of vile "disinformation" were "reports
from Russia," as if everything that comes out of Russia is, ipso facto,
"junk news."
And, what, pray tell, is "conspiratorial political news"? I would argue that
the past year of evidence-lite allegations about "Russian meddling" in the
U.S. election accompanied by unsupported suspicions about "collusion" with
the Trump campaign would constitute "conspiratorial political news." Indeed,
I would say that this Oxford "research" constitutes "conspiratorial
political news" and that Timberg's article qualifies as "junk news."
Predictable Outcome
Given the built-in ideological bias of this "research," it probably won't
surprise you that the report's author, Philip N. Howard, concludes that
"junk news originates from three main sources that the Oxford group has been
tracking: Russian operatives, Trump supporters and activists part of the
alt-right," according to the Post.
The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit:
Washington Post)
I suppose that since part of the "methodology" was to define "reports from
Russia" as "junk news," the appearance of "Russian operatives" shouldn't be
much of a surprise, but the whole process reeks of political bias.
Further skewing the results, the report separated out information from
"professional news organizations [and] political parties" from "some 'junk
news' source," according to the Post. In other words, the "researchers"
believe that "professional news organizations" are inherently reliable and
that outside-the-mainstream news is "junk" - despite the MSM's long record
of getting major stories wrong.
The real "junk" is this sort of academic or NGO research that starts with a
conclusion and packs a "study" in such a way as to guarantee the preordained
conclusion. Or as the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out."
Yet, it's also clear that if you generate "research" that feeds the hungry
beast of Russia-gate, you will find eager patrons doling out dollars and a
very receptive audience in the mainstream media.
In a place like Washington, there are scores if not hundreds of reports
generated every day and only a tiny fraction get the attention of the Times,
Post, CNN, etc., let alone result in published articles. But "studies" that
reinforce today's anti-Russia narrative are sure winners.
So, if you're setting up a new NGO or you're an obscure academic angling for
a lucrative government grant as well as some flattering coverage in the MSM,
the smart play is to join the new gold rush in decrying "Russian
propaganda."
