"Fake news" about Russia - a long and venerable tradition

Edward Herman has an informative survey from a left point of view of the history of dodgy reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution of 1917, Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017 Monthly Review 69:3 (July-August 2017):

Fake news on Russia is a Times tradition that can be traced back at least as far as the 1917 revolution. In a classic study of the paper’s coverage of Russia from February 1917 to March 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz found that “From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. ... They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.” Lippmann and Merz found that strong editorial bias clearly fed into news reporting. The editors’ zealous opposition to the communists led the paper to report atrocities that never happened, and to predict the imminent collapse of the Bolshevik regime no fewer than ninety-one times in three years. Journalists uncritically accepted official statements and relied on reports from unidentified “high authority.” This was standard Times practice.

This fake news performance of 1917–20 was repeated often in the years that followed. The Soviet Union was an enemy target up to the Second World War, and through it all, Times coverage was consistently hostile. With the end of the war and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military rival, and soon a competing nuclear power, the Cold War was on. In the United States, anti-communism became a national religion, and the Soviet Union was portrayed in official discourse and the news media as a global menace in urgent need of containment. With this ideology in place and with U.S. plans for its own global expansion of power established, the Communist threat would help sustain the steady growth of the military-industrial complex and repeated interventions to counter purported Soviet aggressions. [my emphasis]

Herman also lists several notorious cases in which the Times and other major US media were insufficiently critical or outright complicit with misinformation, much of it in the context of the rivalry with the Soviet Union: the overthrow of the elected Guatemalan government in 1954 (Hernan's article is especially interesting on that incident); the Vietnam War; the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II; the nonexistent "missile gap" that played such a large role in the 1960 Presidential election; NATO intervention in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s; and, the nature of US the relationship of the US to the Boris Yeltsin regime.

He raises important points of caution about the controversy over Russian hacking int he 2016 election. On this blog, I've tried to focus on Recognizing the seriousness of the Trump-Russia scandal while being careful about the facts (06/02/2017). My own framing of this set of dilemmas differs from Herman's. My outlook would include the following:

• Russian attempts to interfere with the election results via cyber-meddling are serious, whether they were successful or not.
• It continues to strike me as disingenuous to complain that there is no concrete proof of the hacking claims. The FBI, the CIA and the NSA have all concluded that it occurred, but they can scarcely be expected to make public every piece of information they used to come to that conclusion, despite the many ways in which those same agencies abuse the excessive secrecy which they apply to themselves.
• The Wikileaks revelations on Clinton campaign emails played to both the Republicans obsession with her emails and the national press' seemingly endless temptation. But they were mostly routine campaign gossip. And it's hard to imagine they influenced the outcome in as significant a way as, say, James Comey's infamous press conference days before the election.
• We need a good, professional, thorough investigation of the whole Russian hacking issue by Congress and/or some kind of genuinely independent commission. If the FBI, the CIA and the NSA are making such serious claims on such a major and sensitive issue, the voters need to know about that!
• We can object to foolish foreign policies and military provocations against Russia without exonerating Russia of all dirty business on the election hacking and on seeking illegitimate influence with Trump and his team.
• The fact that neoconservative and liberal-interventionist hawks are seizing on the Russian interference issues to promote their dubious and dangerous foreign policy goals does not mean that we should ignore the seriousness of the hacking and influence operation claims.

But some of the claims Herman makes in recommending caution about facts not clearly established in the public record strike me as a bit over the top. Like this one:

The political point of the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] report [of January 2017] thus seems to have been, at minimum, to tie the Trump administration’s hands in its dealings with Russia. Some analysts outside the mainstream have argued that we may have been witnessing an incipient spy or palace coup that fell short, but still had the desired effect of weakening the new administration. The Times has not offered a word of criticism of this politicization and intervention in the election process by intelligence agencies, and in fact the editors have been working with them and the Democratic Party as a loose-knit team in a distinctly un- and anti-democratic program designed to undermine or reverse the results of the 2016 election, on the pretext of alleged foreign electoral interference. [my emphasis]

But he's right in talking about the ways that the mainstream press has been careless about the facts and willing to treat insufficiently documented claims as settled fact, e.g., the claim that it was Russia that provide the hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks. He doesn't even mention the "17 intelligence agencies" trope that I've discussed here before.

Hernan's article suffers a bit from a common left temptation, to treat outcomes as the successful result of some carefully executed plan by the powerful, e.g., the way he describes Trump's bombing of Syria near the end. The role of blundering and just plain incompetence is often underestimated in important matters of state. This current Administration is especially well-endowed with the latter. And the Democrats haven't exactly been brilliant in their political combat against the Republicans in recent years.