MEDIA GASLIGHTING: Entire Leftist Media Ran With Anonymous “Russian Collusion” Sources
John Griffing
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Media outlets responsible for fabricating and sustaining the “collusion” hoax are escaping scrutiny in the wake of the Department of Justice terminating the Mueller investigation.
Here’s the story on how the legacy media kick-started the laundering of the bogus Steele Dossier claims into America’s psyche.
Liberal household information destinations like The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Vox, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed and the New York Times rushed to scandalize and sensationalize the “Russian hacking” narrative with little more than raw hyperbole and an echo chamber to reinforce each other’s latest spin. When Buzzfeed dumped, WaPo picked it up, and so forth.
It’s transparently clear that America’s most recognizable “left-leaning” news outlets effectively gaslighted readers, always citing the “Steele dossier” authoritatively. These legacy news outlets continued to report this news daily as if it were granted as fact.
Conversely, these irresponsible media outlets insinuated that anyone who didn’t believe their bogus trope about so-called Russian collusion was somehow an irrational being.
The result of this gaslighting campaign has been an increasingly divided American society, as these same media outlets are prone to decry.
When pressed for corroboration of their bogus claims, these outlets produce “anonymous sources,” but those primary sources never spoke for themselves.
Here are some of the most shocking instances of irresponsible sourcing perpetrated by the legacy media:
On January 11, 2017, Paul Wood, of BBC News, wrote that the information in Steele’s dossier was also reported by “multiple intelligence sources” and “at least one East European intelligence service.” They reported that “compromising material on Mr. Trump” included “more than one tape, not just video, but audio as well, on more than one date, in more than one place, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.” While also mentioning that “nobody should believe something just because an intelligence agent says it,” Wood added that “the CIA believes it is credible that the Kremlin has such kompromat—or compromising material—on the next US commander in chief.”
To sum up, a liberal, global cable news source — the BBC — falsely alluded to “sources” to justify a salacious headline, and the never-named “sources” conveniently agree with the claims of the reporter.
In other words, liberal platforms like Buzzfeed were caught citing “anonymous sources,” and simply hoping the gravel foundation didn’t disintegrate.
Perhaps the most glaring example of privileged bias by liberal news outlets on RussiaGate is the definitive expose’ by Howard Blum in Vanity Fair, which provided readers a thorough (but very vague) description of “Steele’s sources,”
“How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.
Such vaguery and innuendo would be shot down in most newsrooms, especially when ethnic backgrounds are being volunteered: “Source E was ‘an ethnic Russian’ and ‘close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump,'” Vanity Fair told readers in its April, 2017 compendium.
“This individual proved to be a treasure trove of information,” the Vanity Fair article continues.
“Speaking in confidence to a compatriot,” the talkative Source E “admitted there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.”
Blum doesn’t offer much in the way of verifying the claims made by his anonymous sources. And now, after the whole RussiaHoax has fallen apart, Blum’s Twitter feed seems heavy on selling books that look like fiction, but which he touts as non-fiction.
Then Blum offers this stream of poorly sourced claims:
“The Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to the WikiLeaks platform.” And finally: “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltic and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”
In this section of what appears to be more akin to fan fiction than reportage, Blum offers exactly zero sourcing for his extremely serious claims: namely the as yet unproven claim that the Russians were definitely behind the DNC email leak, and the serious allegation that the Trump campaign actually agreed to incorporate Russian strategy prescriptions into the campaign platform in exchange for future policy commitments on the world stage.
Subsequently, countless media members breathlessly reported these serious anonymous claims as hard news.
The Vanity Fair article is a giant “he said, she said” exercise and can be read in its entirety by clicking here.
Founder of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald characterizes the mainstream media’s lack of real sources as “One of the most humiliating moments and scandalous moments in the entire media behavior of the Trump-Russia saga.”
Trump’s ex-attorney, Michael Cohen, teamed up with CNN in similar fashion, claiming the existence of “anonymous sources” but refused to produce any definitive evidence they existed in reality:
They said that, according to Cohen, Donald Trump himself knew in advance about his son Don Jr.’s secret meeting with a Russian delegation during the 2016 campaign. These anonymous sources added that Cohen would be happy to tell special counsel Robert Mueller all about this. And other media outlets, such as the Washington Post, soon heard similar things from a source close to Cohen.
Even Vox, headed by noted liberal Ezra Klein throws shade on CNN for their poor reporting:
It’s all rather bizarre, and has led to criticism of CNN for running with the Cohen team’s anonymous claims in the first place — including from President Trump. (CNN stood by its story, saying it had more than one source and that the story accurately described what Cohen’s team was saying.)
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1034934675972792320
Big League Politics will continue to keep an eye out for lazy, irresponsible journalistic practices in the legacy media.
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