Post by 3bid on Aug 8, 2019 14:40:12 GMT -5
The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller - A Matt Taibbi masterpiece!
Click here
Fun reading, but Dead Serious (as in “Dead Media”)A MUST-READ
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Also read:
Russiagate: The Great Tragic Comedy of Modern Journalism
August 4, 2019 Ray McGovern, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity - VIPS
By Matt Bivens, MD, March 25, 2019
blog.usejournal.com/russiagate-the-great-tragic-comedy-of-modern-journalism-fd2a451aaa25
Ray strongly encourages all his acquaintances — including old intelligence analyst colleagues — who are susceptible to infection by “red virus particles” and “whataboutism” to read Dr. Bivens’s essay carefully. One of Ray’s former co-workers became so infected by the red virus that he felt he needed to “denounce” Ray publicly in November 2017 for “adulation of Putin.” Several weeks later he emailed to say that he was “relieved that I need no longer fear that I will be investigated for having associated with you.”
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Another former colleague asked Ray yesterday why “you and The Donald are so tight.” This old friend dismissed the Deep State as “the political Unicorn,” and asked Ray, “When did you buy in to all this?”
Yes, it’s that bad; and these are highly intelligent people, if — like Ray — a little long in the tooth.
The Great Tragic Comedy of Modern Journalism is, of course, far more tragedy than comedy and has taken its toll. That’s why Ray would really like folks to read what Dr. Bivens has written out of his long experience practicing journalism before practicing medicine. His article is an excellent follow-on to the excellent one by Matt Taibbi that we posted yesterday (See: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller.)
Tragedy
It proved too difficult for Robert Parry, founder of Consortium News, to bear what was happening to the profession he practiced with unusually high integrity. Bob had a stroke on Christmas Eve 2017, and had to struggle to put together his cri de coeur a week later. (Please See: consortiumnews.com/2017/12/31/an-apology-and-explanation/ .) He no doubt sensed it might be his last chance.
Robert Parry died on January 27, 2018. Here are some excerpts from what he wrote on that New Years Eve.
Yes, FAR MORE TRAGEDY than comedy.
An Apology and Explanation
By Robert Parry, December 31, 2017
From Editor Robert Parry: For readers who have come to see Consortiumnews as a daily news source, I would like to extend my personal apology for our spotty production in recent days. On Christmas Eve, I suffered a stroke that has affected my eyesight (especially my reading and thus my writing) although apparently not much else. The doctors have also been working to figure out exactly what happened since I have never had high blood pressure, I never smoked, and my recent physical found nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps my personal slogan that “every day’s a work day” had something to do with this.
Perhaps, too, the unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington and national journalism was a factor. It seems that since I arrived in Washington in 1977 as a correspondent for The Associated Press, the nastiness of American democracy and journalism has gone from bad to worse. …
The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is just the most dangerous feature of this propaganda process – and this is where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly come together. The U.S. media’s approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read the New York Times’ or the Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? For instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014. The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from hearing the “other side of the story.” Indeed to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a “Putin apologist” or “Kremlin stooge.”
Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many “liberals” who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the assertions on faith.
The Trump Crisis
Which brings us to the crisis that is Donald Trump. Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton has solidified the new paradigm of “liberals” embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency produced a report last Jan 6 that blamed Russia for “hacking” Democratic emails and releasing them via WikiLeaks. It didn’t seem to matter that these “hand-picked” analysts (as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called them) evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren’t asserting any of this as fact.
The hatred of Trump and Putin was so intense that old-fashioned rules of journalism and fairness were brushed aside. On a personal note, I faced harsh criticism even from friends of many years for refusing to enlist in the anti-Trump “Resistance.” The argument was that Trump was such a unique threat to America and the world that I should join in finding any justification for his ouster. Some people saw my insistence on the same journalistic standards that I had always employed somehow a betrayal.
Other people, including senior editors across the mainstream media, began to treat the unproven Russia-gate allegations as flat fact. No skepticism was tolerated and mentioning the obvious bias among the never-Trumpers inside the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence community was decried as an attack on the integrity of the U.S. government’s institutions. Anti-Trump “progressives” were posturing as the true patriots because of their now unquestioning acceptance of the evidence-free proclamations of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Hatred of Trump had become like some invasion of the body snatchers – or perhaps many of my journalistic colleagues had never believed in the principles of journalism that I had embraced throughout my adult life. To me, journalism wasn’t just a cover for political activism; it was a commitment to the American people and the world to tell important news stories as fully and fairly as I could; not to slant the “facts” to “get” some “bad” political leader or “guide” the public in some desired direction. …
Ironically, the ugly personal characteristics of Donald Trump – his own contempt for facts and his crass personal behavior – have stripped the mask off the broader face of Official America.
What is perhaps most alarming about the past year of Donald Trump is that the mask is now gone and, in many ways, all sides of Official Washington are revealed collectively as reflections of Donald Trump, disinterested in reality, exploiting “information” for tactical purposes, eager to manipulate or con the public. While I’m sure many anti-Trumpers will be deeply offended by my comparison of esteemed Establishment figures with the grotesque Trump, there is a deeply troubling commonality between Trump’s convenient use of “facts” and what has pervaded the Russia-gate investigation.
My Christmas Eve stroke now makes it a struggle for me to read and to write. Everything takes much longer than it once did – and I don’t think that I can continue with the hectic pace that I have pursued for many years. But – as the New Year dawns – if I could change one thing about America and Western journalism, it would be that we all repudiate “information warfare” in favor of an old-fashioned respect for facts and fairness — and do whatever we can to achieve a truly informed electorate.
Amen!
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It’s Finally Time for DNC Email Evidence
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity - VIPS | August 5, 2019
By Patrick Lawrence, August 5, 2019
consortiumnews.com/2019/08/05/patrick-lawrence-finally-time-for-dnc-email-evidence/
Lawrence wrote an equally good piece last August (See *** below) marking the first anniversary of the Memorandum in which VIPS told the President of forensic evidence casting doubt on the claim that Russia, or anyone else, hacked into the DNC. Here’s how that article started:
A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge.
Well, another August is here — still without any credible substantive challenge to VIPS’ main conclusions in 2017. And now, even U.S. District Judges are scratching their heads, asking (in legalese) Where’s the beef?
The way that so many people still have their heads in the sand, there is the (sad) prospect that that Patrick Lawrence will have to write a three-years-after piece next August. As Mark Twain is said to have warned, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Plus, after three years of “Russia-Russia-Russia” in the corporate — and even in some “progressive” — media, this conditioning will not be easy to reverse.
Here’s how one observer described the situation last week, in a comment under one of Ray’s pieces on Consortium News:
“… One can write the most thought-out and well documented academic-like essays, articles and reports and the true believers in Russiagate will dismiss it all with a mere flick of their wrist. The mockery and scorn directed towards those of us who knew the score from day one won’t relent. They could die and go to heaven and ask god what really happened during the 2016 election. God would reply to them in no uncertain terms that Putin and the Russians had absolutely nothing to do with anything in ‘16, and they’d all throw up their hands and say, “aha! So, God’s in on this too!” … [Emphasis added.]
“It’s the great lie that won’t die. The cognitive-dissonance is simply too much.”
*** Too Big to Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack - By Patrick Lawrence, August 13, 2019
consortiumnews.com/2018/08/13/too-big-to-fail-russia-gate-one-year-after-vips-showed-a-leak-not-a-hack/
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Russia-gate as Organized Distraction
By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, July 29, 2019
consortiumnews.com/2019/07/29/russiagate-as-organized-distraction/
Another MUST-READ. Here’s how Professor Boyd-Barrett begins:
For over two years Russiagate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded environmental protections, jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.
In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. Talk about opportunity costs! And talk about things Trump should be impeached for!
In the World of Truth and Fact, Russiagate is Dead. In the World of the Political Establishment, it is Still the New 42
By Craig Murray, August 4, 2019
www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/08/in-the-world-of-truth-and-fact-russiagate-is-dead-in-the-world-of-the-political-establishment-it-is-still-the-new-42/
Includes a short clip of the “near universally praised” Robert Mueller testifying to a gutless House Intelligence Committee, blowing intelligence smoke about the dangers from Iraq a month before the U.S./UK attack.