This “analysis” piece in today’s New York Times (from “The Interpreter”) illustrates pretty well the problem many of us have with our leading news sources in the United States — that they are tepid, apparently cowed by right-wing criticism of the “lamestream media,” and lazily content with repetition, false balance, useless man-on-the-street interviews, and market competition over numbers of eyeballs/clicks rather than amount and quality of new information.
The Interpreter tells us today about “Russia and the U.S. Election: What We Know and Don’t Know.” That seems like a timely and interesting story to analyze, to put it mildly. But what the Times gives us in this piece is in fact far less than any moderately well-informed non-journalist could write on the Russian hacking story at this point. For example, in discussing the practical impact of the Russians’ controlled release of DNC and Clinton Campaign emails, the Times somehow doesn’t think it is appropriate to mention the forced resignation of the chair of the Democratic party in the middle of an election cycle, which was clearly precipitated by emails that we now know to have been strategically leaked by Russia. This omission seems like it may have simply been an oversight — the rest of the story is similarly lazy in its focus only on the reporting over the last few days — but it also bolsters the conclusion The Interpreter reaches in the section entitled “Did Russia swing the election for Mr. Trump?” (NYT answer: “It is impossible to say for sure, [but no]”), and so might have been left out deliberately.
The purpose of the piece, according to the opening paragraphs, is to “separate[e] fact from misconception” on the Russian hacking story. Yet, in the very next paragraph (under the heading “What was Russia’s role in the election?”), The Interpreter states “Russian security agencies infiltrated Democratic National Committee email servers last year and again this spring, according to American intelligence assessments and several independent security firms. The Russians also hacked a private email account belonging to John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.” That’s it. No mention of the hacking of Republican National Committee servers until much later in the story, though that is clearly another revelation from the last few days. Imagine a person on a self-imposed news blackout for the last few weeks (not so far-fetched) learning about the Russian hacking story for the first time through this “analysis.” The piece certainly invites that kind of reader both with its title and with its executive summary, bullet-point format. Now imagine that the reader is hoping to form his or her own conclusions about the motive and impact of the Russian hacking by reading this analysis. Wouldn’t that person want to know in the frame-up of the basic story that both parties were hacked by the Russians, according to U.S. intelligence agencies (but that none of the RNC information was disclosed)? Doesn’t that tend to color the conclusion any interested reader might reach on the big, elementary questions the story seeks to answer: “What was Russia’s role in the election?,” “Did Russia swing the election for Mr. Trump?,” “Was the election itself hacked?,” and “Why does the C.I.A. think Russia wanted to help Mr. Trump?”
By the way, since when does the “C.I.A. think” things? Usually, an intelligence agency “finds,” “reports” or “concludes.” This is not a grammatical point — it is a point about the Times and its Interpreter deliberately choosing to de-authorize the conclusions of the C.I.A., to put them on the same footing as any person or entity who “thinks” something is true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Why would the paper want to de-authorize or delegitimize the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence services? There is really only one reason I can think of: because an important individual, Donald Trump, flatly and without evidence says he doesn’t believe it is true. That’s it. And that’s what is meant by “false balance” in American journalism, Liz Spayd.
The Interpreter makes the point a few times in the piece, apparently based on his personal observations, that there is “growing confusion” in the U.S. about what the Russians allegedly did to “hack” the 2016 presidential election. If there is in fact confusion, then presumably it arises from the use of the word “hack,” which connotes direct tampering with electronic voting machines or digital vote tallies, in the same way that Ferris Bueller “hacked” his high school computer system to directly change his grades. The Interpreter wants to reassure his readers that no such direct hacking of the election results has been found or indeed alleged so far, including by Jill Stein in her various recount requests. He makes the point clearly at one point: “There is no evidence that hackers, from Russia or elsewhere, tampered with the vote tallies.” Fair enough, and good to know. So then why the flirtation in the rest of the piece with a conclusion that goes well beyond the hacking of voting machines and election databases? Why pose (and answer firmly in the negative) the question, “Was the election itself hacked?” We do not have enough experience and history with the term, “the election itself,” for the Times to have concluded unreflectively that it refers only to the mechanical process of ballot-recording and vote-tabulation. Rather, having earlier used the term “vote tallies” to describe these mechanical aspects of the election process, as to which there is “no evidence” of Russian tampering, the shift to grand pronouncements about the “election itself” seems like an effort to blunt controversy or concern about the actual effects of Russian hacking on the election. Or it just seems sloppy.
This sloppiness as to what is meant by the Russian “hacking” of the election — that it relates to the selective release prior to the election of hacked information, rather than direct tampering with vote tallies — crosses over into recklessness at one point:
• Mr. Trump has said there was widespread voter fraud that favored Mrs. Clinton, and some liberal commentators have suggested that the election was hacked. Independent analysts say there is overwhelming evidence against both claims.
Having apparently invented the term, “the election itself,” to refer narrowly (if far from obviously) to the digital/mechanical aspects of the voting process, The Interpreter abandons this term in just the second bullet point, declaring that those liberals who have alleged the “election was hacked” have been conclusively proved wrong. How nice of The Interpreter to include a block quote that be cleanly excerpted from this analysis and reposted to The Blaze! “‘The election was [not] hacked,’ admits elite liberal broadsheet The New York Times!” Why would the Times be so careless in appearing to understate the impact of Russian meddling in the election and simultaneously overstate the offsetting and baseless claims by Donald Trump that “millions of people” voted illegally for Hillary Clinton?
I don’t know the answer, but there are two possibilities I see. One is that, in an effort to appear objective and “interpretive,” the Times has affirmatively decided to downplay (maybe even kill) the partisan/electoral aspects of the Russian hacking story and focus instead on the foreign affairs/espionage angle, as to which there is broader bipartisan interest. The second is hinted at by the last paragraph of the story, in which The Interpreter darkly equates right-wing “fake news” stories and Russian disclosures favoring one presidential candidate over another with the tweets and facebook posts of liberals who question the impact of Russian hacking on the outcome of the 2016 election:
• Not all misconceptions are directed by Moscow, however. Social media rumors that overstate Russia’s involvement in the United States election risk playing into Moscow’s goal of undermining Americans’ faith in the legitimacy and integrity of their democracy.
If the Times really believes that private individuals speaking and writing freely about how Russia could have handed this election to Trump “plays into” the hands of our enemies — if the paper is really so timorous in the face of honest inquiry — then maybe that’s all we really need to know about this piece-of-shit story.