maddow

First, a note in defense of iconic MSNBC host Rachel Maddow:

On the evening of Friday, March 22, 2019, when word leaked out Special Counsel Robert Mueller had wrapped up his investigation and was heading home without recommending new charges, the eyes of the collective journalism world darted in Maddow’s direction.

A massive machinery of ass-covering began whirring. Maddow was the industry name most intimately connected with collusion. She was practically the Madame DeFarge of Russiagate. In 2017 and 2018 The Rachel Maddow Show transformed into the Trump is a Russian Agent show, in which each night a new piece of the conspiracy would be stitched into view for audiences. This put her in some career jeopardy if Trump turned out not to be quite so guilty.

It had been a wire-to-wire routine. When Trump was inaugurated, she quipped, “We’re about to find out if the new President of our country is going to do what Russia wants.” She and fellow MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell wondered aloud if Trump attacked Syria in early 2017 as part of a Putin-orchestrated plan to make him look less Putin-dependent.

She described the Trump presidency as a “continuing operation” of Russian influence. She suggested Trump appointments were done at Russian behest, and dished innuendo freely, saying for instance that Trump was “curiously well-versed” in Russian talking points. Most infamously, during a national cold front in early 2019, she asked her audience, if “Russia killed the power in Fargo today,” then “What would you and your family do?”

It worked, financially most of all. The Russia story helped make Rachel Maddow the #1 cable news host in the country in 2017, smashing her Obama-era ratings. Her ascent continued through early 2019, when she eclipsed 3 million viewers for the first time, an astonishing number for a former little-known host of Air America radio.

Those ratings turned into record profits for MSNBC, making her an iconic rarity within a news business that traditionally struggles on the cash front: a bankable star.

When the Mueller finding of no conspiracy or coordination came back, the leading hotshots in the industry made an instant calculation: Maddow’s two years of conspiratorial rants probably could not be defended. Almost immediately, in the peculiar way my colleagues in the press have when it comes to facing adversity with a sense of bravery and togetherness, they decided to toss her overboard.

The letter by Attorney General William Barr quoting the Mueller report on collusion came out on a Sunday, March 24th. By the next morning of Monday, March 25th the new conventional wisdom was that if mistakes were made, it was the fault of cable news, a small inconsequential island of suckage in a vast sea of responsible journalism. The turnover was so fast, editorials against her must have begun being written more or less at the moment the Barr letter landed.

Some pundits didn’t name Rachel by name. But everyone knew who media writer Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post was talking about when she said the Mueller decision wasn’t a reflection on “serious” journalists.

If anyone had to wear the black eye, Sullivan wrote, it would be “cable pundits” who “make a living off speculation” and those “ridiculous” explosions made by “tiny cannons on Twitter.” Those people, Sullivan sneered, “aren’t really journalists anyway.”

From there, the floodgates opened. “Commentary television is not news,” snapped David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, himself just days removed from saying on Democracy Now! that “I think [Trump] is a Russian agent.”

He added: “Rachel Maddow in particular has certainly pushed the Mueller matter,” doing so in conjunction with “the facts at the time.” However, he said, her work was “driven by the commercial values of television.”

“Cable television,” wrote Columbia Journalism Dean Steve Coll in the New Yorker, “mixes field reporting and news-making interviews with personal asides from prime-time personalities and roundtables of bombast-mongers.”

After Mueller’s “March surprise” (which wasn’t a surprise to me and a lot of other reporters), Coll added it would be “unrealistic” to expect audiences could make the distinction between “editorializing and reporting.”

“Yes, the mainstream press gave too much credence to the Steele dossier and rushed to publish too quickly on seemingly incriminating stories,” piled on Ross Douthat at the New York Times. “But as long as you got news from somewhere other than Rachel Maddow the case for skepticism was amply available as well.”

These people all worked in organizations that either bungled Russia stories as MSNBC did, or shamelessly hyped fears to boost ad sales as MSNBC did, or both.

Douthat’s New York Times outstripped Rachel’s act with its insane infographic series, Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation from the Cold War to Kanye. (Kanye!) Maddow never described Russia, as this Times animation piece did, as a virus literally eating us alive at the cellular level. She was never so shameless as to blame Russia for your creeping sensation that the American media is not awesome at its job. From Infektion:

“If you don’t know who to trust anymore, this might be the thing that’s making you feel that way,” the Times suggested, over graphics of red disease eating your cells. “If you feel exhausted by the news, this could be why.”

Absent a crazy new development, Rachel will almost certainly be turned into the Judith Miller of Russiagate, the human symbol of What Went Wrong. Just like Judith Miller, she won’t deserve to wander the desert alone.

Future commentators will probably make note of the obvious fact that in both cases outspoken women ended up being the ones herded out of the village by colleagues, forced to wear the yoke of journalistic blame. Make what you will of that, but it’s not all on her.

Rachel Maddow is not on the cover of this book because of anything she did by mistake, because Russiagate turned out to be a bad guess.

She’s on the cover because of what she did on purpose, with the core concept of both her program and her public image, before the Russia story. She transformed from a sharp-minded, gregarious, small-time radio host to a towering patriotic media cudgel, a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity.

Because I still live in the New York area, because most of my friends vote Democratic, and because I work for a liberal-leaning magazine, I heard much protest and rending of garments when the proposed cover art for Hate Inc. was released, showing Rachel Maddow sharing top billing with Sean Hannity.

“How can you even compare Rachel Maddow to Sean Hannity?” people barked. It’s preposterous! Unforgivable! A cheap hot take!

No, it’s not. The two characters do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the same.

The major difference is one is smarter than the other, which is not actually a mark in Rachel’s favor. If anything, it’s a check against her. Sean Hannity’s one-note brain (seemingly located in his neck) and relentless enthusiasm for high-volume blame-seeking appear genetic, deficits he was born with to help him become a perfect Anger-TV pitchman.

Rachel had to think her way into this job. She’s smart enough to know better.

I know this because I’ve known Rachel for more than a decade, going back to her Air America radio days.

We met in the Bush years, at the heat of the march to the Iraq war, when she laughed at the crude appeals to national unity and the fear-based marketing of the invasion. Even years later, she lampooned the idea of intelligence agencies being ordered, “Find the evidence.”

The Maddow I knew thought all of this was absurd (perhaps even more absurd more than angering). I admired her as someone who was smart, quick, and funny. She has since sacrificed even her sense of humor to MSNBC, letting the network commoditize this side of her to the point of unrecognizability.

Her personal politics, at least from what I remember, are further to the progressive side than the hawkish mainstream Democratic line that makes up the meat of her program today. She’s even, to small degrees, expressed her sense of being personally distant from the Democratic party on other formats, like Late Night With Seth Myers.

That she is now a flag-waver and the country’s strictest partisan blows my mind. It’s the stuff of movies, one in particular.

A Face in the Crowd, the 1957 film by On The Waterfront maker Elia Kazan, tells a story of a drunken drifter named Larry Rhodes, discovered by an idealistic reporter. The drifter, played by then-unknown Andy Griffith, has natural charm, wit, and an ability to connect with crowds.

He is eventually given a TV program under the new name of “Lonesome” Rhodes. Griffith uses it to create a homespun, aw-shucks, man of the people act on air that makes him more powerful than politicians.

The movie was diffidently received in 1957, because it was about the as-yet undiscovered power of television. It was revived and praised by liberal commentators in the late 2000s, given credit for predicting the rise of people like Glenn Beck.

James Wolcott of Vanity Fair in 2007 described A Face in the Crowd as a movie about a man who becomes the “puppet of a populist scheme orchestrated by corporate overlords, who exploit his likability as a lever of social control.”

What the movie described, and what the late-fifties public wasn’t yet ready to understand, was the power of media to use non-intellectual cues and personality to deliver votes in great sacks. Politicians may gather big tents of disparate constituencies; media figures deliver fans. Their followers’ support is more insoluble than that of politicians.

“I’m not just an entertainer,” Rhodes roars in the film. “I’m an influencer, a wielder of opinion. A force!”

Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg were most afraid that a Rhodes-like character would be appropriated by upper-class, and probably right-wing, pols. It was a keen parable about the coming American culture war, with Rhodes discovered in the sticks, used to sell the upper-crust politics of a California Senator named Worthington Fuller.

The latter has Rhodes saying things like, “I wish you’d give me the cotton-pickin’ truth on how you feel about more and more and more Social Security.” At which point we learn from homespun Rhodes the original Americans only needed an axe and a gun, not no derned pension insurance.

The concept of wedding low-information voters to self-defeating initiatives has been a terror of progressive commentators for years. This is why Rhodes was invariably cited as having predicted the rise of types like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Donald Trump.

A Face in the Crowd should have been a warning that any kind of superficial cultural identifiers could be used to sell political lines. It isn’t just rubes who can be taken in. The college-and-coffee crowd is just as susceptible to brand-over-thought come-ons, and can even fall for appeals to fear and patriotism. The pitchman will be different, but it will still be a pitch.

“In time of imminent crisis and danger,” Rhodes grins in the film, “who could rally the people better than I could?”

It’s hard to imagine a character less like Larry Rhodes in real life than Rachel Maddow. But the journey ends up being similar. Just as it did with Rhodes, TV ate the person underneath, and used her superficial qualities to sell a political product.

Unfortunately, today’s best-selling product is partisan division.

People like Margaret Sullivan are half-right. Cable news hosts aren’t “journalists” in the traditional sense. They’re not selling news but an entertainment product, one that hooks audiences on rhetorical pace and conspiratorial energy.

The cable host is a ship captain, imploring audiences to pull oars. The aim is to drive narratives ever faster, faster, faster, toward a dot on the horizon that distantly represents undefined political triumph, a promised land for viewers.

The oars all have to be pulling in the same direction for this to work. For this reason, you can’t invite dissenting voices on unless they’re there to be ritually dismantled. This formula used to be exclusive to Fox, whose anchors until recently were the only practitioners of the genre who were any good at it.

Hannity’s schtick epitomizes the formula. The Sean Hannity Show is an uncomplicated gruel of resentment, vituperation and doomsaying. The plot never changes:

The Democrats are always up to no good, and Captain Sean is there every night to point you toward the secret truth about the huge short-sighted political mistake the Democrats just made! (This is one of his favorite segment themes). He’ll show you how the mainstream media elite is laughing at you, and trying to force down your throat a Leninist program of wealth redistribution, gun confiscation, forced abortion and anti-Christian cultural hegemony.

Those same libruls want to open the borders and replace you at work with an immigrant, who incidentally will be encouraged to vote at least three times.

Every show is some variation on these themes. He’ll have on a series of guests to provide context (read: to agree with him in their own words). A recent list of Hannity guests: Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Ted Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, Devin Nunes, Alan Dershowitz, Joe Lieberman, Glenn Beck, etc.

Hannity will occasionally do “balance,” and what “balance” looks like on one of these channels is a member of the other party (because no other forms of thought exist). The alien will come on to be grilled and, hopefully, defeated. It should be noted that Fox seems to do this more often than MSNBC these days, not that this is a good thing necessarily.

Tucker Carlson seems to do it more than most, probably because he has the most experience with this format from his Crossfire days and is better at it than anyone. Hannity of course did it too with Hannity & Colmes, although Colmes was an obvious Washington Generals act designed to make Hannity look good, while Carlson occasionally had to break a sweat in his pummelings of faux-liberals like Paul Begala.

But “balance” does happen. Donna Brazile, for instance, actually has a decent relationship with Hannity (I even found an episode where she calls him “Boo”). The dance in those episodes is undisguised, symbiotic PR.

Brazile will come on, win over a small slice of Hannity’s audience by conceding that he is technically a human being, then plug something like a book. Hannity meanwhile will make sure audiences don’t doubt for a second his bona fides by relentlessly haranguing her about socialism or the Green New Deal or whatever.

This is a huge tell in modern division-media: when the alien idea is allowed on air, it never gets a polite hearing. It isn’t allowed to answer at length. Questions are framed as you hear them from prosecutors confronting a defense witness. An example is Tucker Carlson interviewing California Democrat Adam Schiff about Russian interference.

First, Carlson agreed that hacking emails is bad (prosecutors also always introduce inevitable negative evidence first, if they can), then pointed out the leaked DNC emails were real, and asked Schiff why it should be bad for voters to get real information. Schiff began to say something about how it set a bad precedent to allow foreign governments to meddle in our elections, but he didn’t answer quickly enough:

SCHIFF: Because Putin is not our friend. He may think…

CARLSON (interrupting, squinting in frustration): I get it, I get it! Nobody’s for hacking. But let me just make one point clear. You don’t know that Vladimir Putin was behind those hacks.

SCHIFF: Well, we do know this, I –

CARLSON: But you don’t know that. So don’t pretend that you do.

Next question! That’s how the format works. Carlson is the best at this by far. He makes his “contra” guests look like stammering weenies, never letting them express their points. This actually requires some skill on top of an advanced bullying instinct.

His opponents are always left looking a few steps behind Tucker’s Giant Enormous Lie-Smashing Brain, the point of the show. The premise is Tucker delivering on his promise to be the “sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink.”

Carlson does this even with guests who are trying, in a way, to seek a kind of accommodation with him (see “The Ten Rules of Hate” section about his unnecessarily nasty interaction with former Times public editor Liz Spayd).

This degraded form of “balance” is about as good as it gets on cable. The issue here isn’t so much that Tucker Carlson is afraid of other points of view, but that his audiences – after years of watching his shows – will be. Watch cable long enough, and you’ll become like a pre-schooler addicted to video games, unable to do a pushup. With cable news, the brain atrophies, and you soon find yourself unable to handle unorthodox thoughts.

Modern cable news is a promise to protect the viewer from intellectual challenge. The viewer must never have to question his or her beliefs. The easiest way to accomplish that is by focusing constantly on the failures of others, which is why these shows dwell to the exclusion of all else on the iniquity of the “other side.”

There are no morally neutral concepts. We don’t meet the 45% of Americans who don’t vote and/or don’t care about politics. We don’t meet people in jails or in rough city neighborhoods who think it’s all bunk, that neither party is interested in their problems.

We don’t meet people whose thinking splits caricatures. The Democratic shows won’t bring on the Muslim or Asian immigrant restaurant owner who comes with nothing but builds a life here through hard work, and as a result resents welfare and business regulation and taxes. That same person won’t appear on the Republican show if he or she is too vociferous about immigrant rights and immigration reform.

Gray areas don’t work on these shows. There is us and them and none of the show can be about questioning us. This is why the guest lists are so thick with coiffed professional partisans: either politicians themselves or pundits closely associated with one party or another. They are visions of perfection: perfect hair, facial blemishes makeupped away, and matching certitude in their political positions. Almost no one else fits the binary requirement.

The Rachel Maddow Show in the Trump era assumed this exact us-and-them format, down to the last detail. It’s been amazing, watching a woman who in life is naturally bright and inquisitive, turned into a vehicle for this kind of extreme anti-intellectual exercise.

She does the exact segments Hannity does, in reverse. Those dumb Republicans sure have made a terrible political miscalculation this time! Tune in to find out how the GOP courts disaster, confusion with its rush to implement a tax bill! Or: Trump’s emergency declaration could backfire and force Republican cooperation with the Dems! The Republican crusade against Adam Schiff could make them “laughingstocks”!

Republicans, we’re told, hate immigrants, are all racist, and most important of all recently, complicit in helping Donald Trump help Vladimir Putin Attack Our Democracy.

Let’s have some guests on to talk about all of this. How about Dan Rather, Ron Wyden, Adam Schiff, Michael McFaul, David Cay Johnston, Robby Mook, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Mazie Hizono, Joy Reid, Chris Coons, Patty Murray, Richard Blumenthal, et cetera, et cetera. 

These are all, essentially, professional partisans. They’re there because they’ve been proven dependable when it comes to seeing everything as ultimately the fault of Republicans.

MSNBC has had Republicans and ex-Republicans on in the last few years, mostly apostates or never-Trumpers, on to denounce either Trump or the his new breed of deplorable MAGA Republican. Occasionally an “R” will appear for some other reason, perhaps to attest to some other crime against oligarchical decency, like being insufficiently worshipful of John McCain.

But Rachel Maddow tends not to do those interviews. Bill Kristol is mostly a Brian Williams guest. Steve Schmidt, the former campaign adviser to McCain, tends to be a Nicole Wallace guest.

It doesn’t matter. That kind of “balance” tends to fake anyway. Still, her show almost never criticizes Democrats for anything, and even clearly bipartisan issues like the passage of a massive defense hike turn into Trump stories on her show.

The Rachel Maddow Show may, however, feature a cheery interview with a former CIA chief like John Brennan or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Rachel criticized Brennan years ago, before this Trump-era transformation of hers, over issues like torture. Her show’s blog also went after Clapper once for lying to Congress (saying they weren’t sure “why Republicans are giving him a pass on this”). Now the security chiefs are anti-Trump allies, welcome in the tent.

Beyond the parade of security officials who’ve become legion in MSNBC’s ranks, Rachel’s shows are almost entirely mutual massage sessions with Democratic Party glitterati, who often seem more interested in her than she is in the guest (this Face in the Crowd dynamic was often present with Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Hannity as well). In many cases it’s clear the Democrat guest is seeking something like an endorsement from Maddow, the bigger star with the bigger Q rating.

This is where the humor issue comes into play. Most any political guest, particularly one currently running for office, will make a point of pretending to go insane with laughter at a Maddow one-liner early in the segment. Part of the conceit of the show is that Rachel Maddow, when she’s not relentlessly conquering Republican evil, nurtures a hobby as the most effortlessly funny person on earth.

The Jimmy Dore Show caught a great example recently. On the day word leaked out that Mueller finished his investigation, Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Rachel if she’d caught any trout. Rachel said at the top of the show she’d interrupted a trout-fishing vacation to race to a studio to cover news of the Mueller investigation closing.

The exchange:

MADDOW:  No – well, you know, I’ve learned two things in life.  Never ever ask a woman if she’s pregnant and never ever –

(hysterical laughter by Klobuchar)

MADDOW:  Never ever ask a person who has just completed a day of fishing if they caught a fish.

(more hysterical laughter)

There’s nothing monstrous about this, but it’s part of a dreary audience-signaling effort. It’s much the same as the New York Times selling audience solidarity when its post-election headline in November of 2016 read:

DEMOCRATS, STUDENTS, AND FOREIGN ALLIES FACE THE REALITY OF A TRUMP PRESIDENCY

That headline doesn’t so much give you news as it does reinforce your sense of who besides you is reading the newspaper. SENSIBLE PEOPLE LIKE YOU REACT TO TRUMP WIN is how that head will read to future historians.

MSNBC is similarly selling audience solidarity when it brings on parades of people who agree with one another. What they end up building is an orthodoxy, an audience more interested in seeing its values and beliefs represented as righteous than in taking in a confusing litany of perhaps-contradictory facts.

What makes this a critical part of the Hate media era is that the group is bound most of all by its collective disgust and disdain for the other. Maddow defenders will say she’s nowhere near as vicious and deceptive as Hannity and therefore doesn’t belong in the same category. But she builds her audience the same way. All the things “we” used to complain about with Fox, now are common on MSNBC.

Fox invented the viewer who assumed everyone who didn’t agree with him or her was an Clinton/Obama fan. For years I would be astonished that every Fox-watching conservative who wrote to complain about X or Y line in one of my articles assumed I was on the Obama payroll and would never criticize a Democrat.

When I’d reply that I’d actually written whole books doing just that, they’d typically disappear. Fox had trained them to think that the only kind of people on earth apart from Righteous People Who Agree With Me are Democrats. They hated the idea of new and different personality types more than they hated my reporting.

There will be Democrats who protest: but Republicans are racist! It’s right to be organized in solidarity against them! Donald Trump is evil! Rachel is right! That’s why she doesn’t belong in the same discussion as Hannity, a bully who reportedly has a history of accusing saying homosexuality is practiced by people committing “deviant, twisted acts.” She’s never done anything like that!

Okay. But are all Republicans alike? Are they caricatures? How many people are defined by something they do once in four years? (Or don’t do at all – remember, non-voters are significantly more numerous than either faction.)

Traveling the country covering elections, I meet a huge spectrum of people at Republican events. Some threatened me physically. Others I thought were crazy. Others I actually liked, or at least found interesting. In Arizona I ran into a biker gang outside a Trump event – this was after he’d been elected – whose members were blasted out of their minds. One said he’d voted for Trump because “fuck it and fuck them.”

“Fuck who exactly?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Anyone. You?”

The “fuck it” vote felt like a huge part of Trump’s win. Lots of people recognized Trump was a jackass and that’s actually why they voted for him. As has been reported many times, people who disliked Trump and Clinton were maybe his most important constituency.

These people were so pissed and depressed and angry with everyone – including especially phonies on television – that they sent Trump to Washington hoping he would blow us all up, so America could start over. Such people are not going to be receptive to a 24-hour lineup of anti-Trump news because they hate the partisanship more than Trump.

The “Trump: Let’s get this shit over with” theory – the idea that America was already a failed state and a vote for Trump would just help us to the inevitable ending faster – was posited on the Horace and Pete show during the 2016 election.

It might have made Rachel laugh back in the old days, even if she didn’t agree with it. Exploring the nature of that level of political nihilism could have been something she’d have considered interesting once.

An intellectually confident audience should be able to engage these attitudes without instant recrimination, just like they should be able to engage the notion that Democrats and Republicans are actually partners in some important areas. They should be able to take in the hard truth about the ballooning defense budget, giant tax breaks for private equity chiefs, bailouts, handouts to big Pharma, and other problems with bipartisan origins.

But they can’t. We’ve built audiences who can’t handle contradictions, oddities, or subtleties. Everything is a clear fight between good and bad sides.

The Rachel Maddow Show and The Sean Hannity Show have become the Crossfire for the new generation. In this updated version of fake political combat sold as theater, the pugilists never meet in the ring.

MSNBC and Fox are like two phony-tough bar belligerents who yell and scream taunts from a safe distance, while their “friends” hold them back to make sure no one actually has to win or lose. In the metaphor, viewers are the “friends” who hold their hosts back.

The implied context of both shows is a never-ending culture war. Each cherry-pick that day’s news to see, gotcha, whose side did better today.

There is no other content. In this sense The Rachel Maddow Show is an absolute adherent to the Ten Rules of Hate. The program, coupled with Hannity, is America’s leading purveyor of the “There are only two ideas” concept, the insane notion that Democrats and Republicans own the only two brands of thought in existence.

This is why the most rigidly-enforced rule of all (similar to the op-ed sections of the big daily papers, where you’ll find Republican pundits but no socialists, pacifists, anarchists, or any other form of “ist”) is the exclusion of other brands of progressivism from the supposedly left-leaning program.

This tunnel-vision strategy is what led to the excesses in Russiagate, when the Rachel Maddow Show committed exhaustive resources to a story that went off rails. Just like Fox, whose founder Roger Ailes bragged about suckering an audience “55 to dead,” MSNBC repeatedly promised an older audience – its median viewer is 65 – that the trauma of Trump’s election would soon be relieved when Mueller led Trump out of the White House in handcuffs.

During this time the network wasn’t above fear-mongering, jingoism, xenophobia, and other tactics that used to be an anathema to progressive thinking, and the exclusive province of channels like Fox.

The essence of hate is fear. It’s the key lesson in To Kill a Mockingbird: we fear what we can’t see. We tell stories about what’s on the other side of the wall. Harper Lee describes how the town of Maycomb despises Boo Radley, spinning legends about Boo coming out at night to kill pets.

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. But we can’t know unless we knock on his door and ask. Rachel Maddow, like Hannity, has built an audience of non-engagers. I suspect this is a conscious strategy, a result of years of effort among Democrats to build their own version of the right-wing propaganda machine. This has been a constant obsession of socially liberal media magnates since the Clinton years. This talk has circulated for decades.

But right-wing propaganda works precisely because it’s a total betrayal of how reporting is supposed to work. Journalism gives people the facts no matter where they lead, and operates on the assumption that informed citizens make better decisions.

Fox pioneered the opposite view, that people are too stupid to be trusted with all sides of an argument. They created techniques for factory-style partisan politicization of content, picking and choosing stories to shape viewers into voters.

“We report, you decide,” again, was an industry in-joke. In fact they wanted audiences who jumped past thought to emotion, outrage, and loyalty. In sports terms, Fox voters root for the laundry. They resist switching allegiance because they’ve been trained to reject outside ideas as contaminants.

These are all awful things, and this longtime vision of Democrats who want to ape the Fox model I think know it on some level. Watch Rachel’s own reaction when she reports on an uncomfortable interview she did with Bernie Sanders in 2016. In that interview, she noted, “He also said the Democratic Party should fund its own version of Fox news!”

At which point she smiled and threw her hands out in dramatic fashion, a gesture of ironic exclamation. The joke was, we already have the Democratic Fox, or, we’re trying, anyway.

If you’re a Democrat, you naturally think “our” Fox is not such a bad thing as the original. But thinking MSNBC is better than Fox is not the same as thinking Democrats are better than Republicans. The standard for news reporting is different than politics.

One political party may be preferable to another. A news channel, though, can’t be a vehicle for a political party and be anything but a bad thing. It instantly becomes tool for deception and division.

A political party cannot spend time dwelling on its own weaknesses and corruption and hope to succeed. A news organization has to do look hard in the mirror to be credible. It has to challenge everything, including especially its own audience.

Rachel Maddow, small-time radio host, was free to do that. Now that person has been consumed by a billion-dollar brand and the inflexible political platform it sells. What she reads each night is not the news. It’s Stars and Stripes for a demographic, the same job that made Sean Hannity a star.


FAKE NEWS

The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently said he was “not convinced” on the whole “bot thing.”

But when one of your top sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your article, you should at least take the quote out, or put an update online. No luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.

Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc.

With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially said the Russian traded sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to undermine democracy, a “real-life Red Sparrow,” as ABC put it.

But a judge threw out the sex charge after “five minutes” when it turned out to be based on a single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina’s car for inspection.

It’s pretty hard to undo public perception you’re a prostitute once it’s been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like “Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan” online in the New York Times.

Here a reporter might protest: how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn’t I believe them?

How about because, authorities have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It doesn’t take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving the media.

As noted before, from World War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents to the “missile gap” that wasn’t (the “gap” was leaked to the press before the Soviets had even one operational ICBM) to the Gulf of Tonkin mess to all the smears of people like Martin Luther King, it’s a wonder newspapers listen to whispers from government sources at all.

In the Reagan years National Security Adviser John Poindexter spread false stories about Libyan terrorist plots to The Wall Street Journal and other papers. In the Bush years, Dick Cheney et al were selling manure by the truckload about various connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, infamously including a story that bomber Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.

The New York Times ran a story that Atta was in Prague in late October of 2001, even giving a date of the meeting with Iraqis, April 8, or “just five months before the terrorist attacks.” The Prague story was another example of a tale that seemed shaky because American officials were putting the sourcing first on foreign intelligence, then on reporters themselves. Cheney cited the Prague report in subsequent TV appearances, one of many instances of feeding reporters tidbits and then selling reports as independent confirmation.

It wasn’t until three years later, in 2004, that Times reporter James Risen definitively killed the Atta-in-Prague canard (why is it always Prague?) in a story entitled “No evidence of meeting with Iraqi.” By then, of course, it was too late. The Times also held a major dissenting piece by Risen about the WMD case, “C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports,” until days after war started. This is what happens when you start thumbing the scale.

This failure to demand specifics has been epidemic in Russiagate, even when good reporters have been involved. One of the biggest “revelations” of this era involved a story that was broken first by a terrible reporter (the Guardian’s Luke Harding) and followed up by a good one (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker). The key detail involved the elusive origin story of Russiagate.

Mayer’s piece, the March 12, 2018 “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” in the New Yorker, impacted the public mainly by seeming to bolster the credentials of the dossier author. But it contained an explosive nugget far down. Mayer reported Robert Hannigan, then-head of the GCHQ (the British analog to the NSA) intercepted a “stream of illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan flew to the U.S. and briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.

When I read that, a million questions came to mind, but first: what did “illicit” mean?

If something “illicit” had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we deserve to know?

I asked the Guardian: “Was any attempt made to find out what those communications were? How was the existence of these communications confirmed? Did anyone from the Guardian see or hear these intercepts, or transcripts?”

Their one-sentence reply:

The Guardian has strict and rigorous procedures when dealing with source material.

That’s the kind of answer you’d expect from a transnational bank, or the army, not a newspaper.

I asked Mayer the same questions. She was more forthright, noting that, of course, the story had originally been broken by Harding, whose own report said “the precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public.”

She added that “afterwards I independently confirmed aspects of [Harding’s piece] with several well-informed sources,” and “spent months on the Steele story [and] traveled to the UK twice for it.” But, she wrote, “the Russiagate story, like all reporting on sensitive national security issues, is difficult.”

I can only infer she couldn’t find out what “illicit” meant despite proper effort. The detail was published anyway. It may not have seemed like a big deal, but I think it was.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily disbelieve the idea that there were “illicit” contacts between Trump and Russians in early 2015 or before. But if there were such contacts, I can’t think of any legitimate reason why their nature should be withheld from the public.

If authorities can share reasons for concern with foreign countries like Israel, why should American voters not be so entitled? Moreover the idea that we need to keep things secret to protect sources and methods and “tradecraft” (half the press corps became expert in goofy spy language over the last few years, using terms like “SIGINT” like they’ve known them their whole lives), why are we leaking news of our ability to hear Russian officials cheering Trump’s win?

Failure to ask follow-up questions happened constantly with this story. One of the first reports that went sideways involved a similar dynamic: the contention that some leaked DNC emails were forgeries.

MSNBC’s “Intelligence commentator” Malcolm Nance, perhaps the most enthusiastic source of questionable #Russiagate news this side of Twitter conspiracist Louise Mensch, tweeted on October 11, 2016: “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.”

As noted in The Intercept and elsewhere, this was re-reported by the likes of David Frum (a key member of the club that has now contributed to both the WMD and Russiagate panics) and MSNBC host Joy Reid. The reports didn’t stop until roughly October of 2016, among other things because the Clinton campaign kept suggesting to reporters the emails were fake. This could have been stopped sooner if examples of a forgery had been demanded from the Clinton campaign earlier.

Another painful practice that became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to what they’ve told you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application involving Trump or his campaign. “I can deny it,” he said.

It soon after came out this wasn’t true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small misstatement by Clapper, because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed in a tweet he’d had his “wires tapped.” Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately so, but in addition to the Page news, it later came out there had been a FISA warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the subject of “incidental” surveillance.

Whether or not this was meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions. The important thing is, Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn’t know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely. Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he had Clapper back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine, never confronting him about the issue.

Reporters repeatedly got burned and didn’t squawk about it. Where are the outraged stories about all the scads of anonymous “people familiar with the matter” who put reporters in awkward spots in the last years? Why isn’t McClatchy demanding the heads of whatever “four people with knowledge” convinced them to double down on the Cohen-in-Prague story?

Why isn’t every reporter who used “New Knowledge” as a source about salacious Russian troll stories out for their heads (or the heads of the congressional sources who passed this stuff on), after reports they faked Russian trolling? How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use New Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate?

How do the Guardian’s editors not already have Harding’s head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the most dubious un-retracted story in modern history – the tale that the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I’d be dragging Harding’s “well placed source” into the office and beating him with a hose until he handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence.

The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources. Too often, it felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to take the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no sense of institutional self-esteem about this.

Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that route?

This posture has all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan – the same Brennan who should himself have faced charges for lying to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff – need the press to whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don’t have better things to do than that “work”?

This catalogue of factual errors and slavish stenography will stand out when future analysts look back at why the “MSM” became a joke during this period, but they were only a symptom of a larger problem. The bigger issue was a radical change in approach.

A lot of #Russiagate coverage became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called “connecting the dots.” This was allowed because the press committed to a collusion narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that would never be permitted in normal times.

Such was the case with Jonathan Chait’s #Russiagate opus, “PRUMP TUTIN: Will Trump be Meeting With his Counterpart – or his Handler?” The story was also pitched as “What if Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987?” which recalls the joke from The Wire: “Yo, Herc, what if your mother and father never met?” What if isn’t a good place to be in this business.

This cover story (!) in New York magazine was released in advance of a planned “face-to-face” summit between Trump and Putin, and posited Trump had been under Russian control for decades. Chait noted Trump visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and came back “fired up with political ambition.” He offered the possibility that this was a coincidence, but added:

Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely.

I searched the Chait article up and down for reporting that would justify the suggestion Trump had been a Russian agent dating back to the late eighties, when, not that it matters, Russia was a different country called the Soviet Union.

Only two facts in the piece could conceivably have been used to support the thesis: Trump met with a visiting Soviet official in 1986, and visited the Soviet Union in 1987. That’s it. That’s your cover story.

Worse, Chait’s theory was first espoused in Lyndon Larouche’s “Elephants and Donkeys” newsletter in 1987, under a headline, “Do Russians have a Trump card?” This is barrel-scraping writ large.

It’s a mania. Putin is literally in our underpants. Maybe, if we’re lucky, New York might someday admit its report claiming Russians set up an anti-masturbation hotline to trap and blackmail random Americans is suspicious, not just because it seems absurd on its face, but because its source is the same “New Knowledge” group that admitted to faking Russian influence operations in Alabama.

But what retraction is possible for the Washington Post headline, “How will Democrats cope if Putin starts playing dirty tricks for Bernie Sanders (again)?” How to reverse Rachel Maddow’s spiel about Russia perhaps shutting down heat across America during a cold wave? There’s no correction for McCarthyism and fearmongering.

This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will remain.

It’s hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.

I didn’t really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by those same intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server**, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.

We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on Trump and Russia.

The WMD mess had massive real-world negative impact, leading to over a hundred thousand deaths and trillions in lost taxpayer dollars. Unless Russiagate leads to a nuclear conflict, we’re unlikely to ever see that level of consequence.

Still, Russiagate has led to unprecedented cooperation between the government and Internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all of which are censoring pages on the left, right, and in between in the name of preventing the “sowing of discord.” The story also had a profound impact on the situation in places like Syria, where Russian and American troops have sat across the Euphrates River from one another, two amped-up nuclear powers at a crossroads.

As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.


Matt TaibbiApr 3

There are no indictments, no further charges, and unless Barr is misquoting Mueller, nothing even inadvertent in the area of a conspiratorial link involving the election. Also, as I’ve documented at length, there has never been any evidence in that direction - none. Bob Woodward found the same thing and so did Sy Hersh. We have been told such evidence exists, but when pressed to produce it, no one ever has. So what are we taking about? Non-criminal, unwitting espionage?

This is similar to the WMD story in that the question of whether or not there were WMDs was always a canard. It was irrelevant and obvious it had nothing to do with why we were invading.

With this story, it was clear from the start the Steele theory was idiotic, or at least baseless. As even Michael Morell - who would have been Hillary’s CIA Chief - said, it was smoke, but absolutely “no fire.” I’ve been 99% sure of this myself for two years. I held out for all this time on the remote chance there was some unreleased detail that would turn all of this into a real case. Mueller going home without recommending new charges confirms all of this. So does Nancy Pelosi deciding not to impeach. This means it’s already a guarantee every story asserting Trump was a Russian agent was wrong. I don’t doubt there will other things in the report, but on that point, it’s settled.