NOAM CHOMSKY
"U.S. Media is Culpable for Disseminating Fake & Deceitful News on Russia"
Glenn Greenwald: "So let’s focus on the extraordinary behavior of The
Washington Post for the moment. They have produced two of the most
humiliating debacles in American journalism over the last several years.
And these two humiliations have taken place just within the last six
weeks, both of which were about completely fictitious and fabricated
claims about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin and Russia.
The
first was on November 24th, when they claimed, based on a newly formed
anonymous group, that there has been a very widespread, successful
effort to implant Kremlin propaganda in the American discourse. And they
accomplish this by giving credence to this secret list that this
anonymous group of cowards had created in which they claim that a whole
range of American media outlets and websites, such as the Drudge Report
and other libertarian critics of Hillary Clinton on the right and
long-standing left-wing critics of the Democratic Party, like Naked
Capitalism and Truthout and Truthdig on the left—they decree them to be
tools of Kremlin propaganda. And The Washington Post created this huge
story, that went all over the place, based upon giving credence to this
list and saying that Russian propaganda had been viewed more than 200
million times in the United States. Journalists all over Twitter,
throughout the American media, mindlessly spread it, aggressively
endorsed it. It became a huge story. And over the course of the next two
weeks, the story completely collapsed, and there’s now a major editor’s
note at the top of the article disclaiming the key source, saying that
they did not intend to in any way vouch for the validity of the findings
of the source on which the entire story was based.
But even more
embarrassing was this weekend, when the Post trumpeted this story on
Friday night that Vladimir Putin and Russia had hacked into the electric
grid of the United States through a Vermont utility, which caused
Vermont officials like the governor and Senator Pat Leahy to issue
statements saying Vladimir Putin is trying to endanger the safety and
the welfare of Vermonters by stealing their heat in the winter. The
whole story, from start to finish, turned out to be a complete
fabrication. There was no invasion of the American electric grid. The
malware that was found on one laptop had nothing to do with Russia. The
story was completely false. And again, the American media, in this
hysteria, kept spreading and endorsing it.
And in both cases, the
retractions were barely noted. So you have millions of people being
misled into this hysteria, into this view that Russia is this grave
threat, and when the story journalistically collapses, they barely hear
about it. And it happened over and over through the election, with Slate
saying that a secret server had been found between Donald Trump and a
Russian bank, which turned out to be completely false. The Post aired
allegations that Putin had poisoned Hillary Clinton on the day that she
collapsed on 9/11. And so, it’s not really just dishonesty. It’s the
kind of behavior we saw in 2002, where American media outlets are
willing to publish anything that the U.S. government tells them to
publish, to inflate and expand the threat posed by Russia, to raise fear
levels to the highest possible degree. And it’s an incredibly
irresponsible and dangerous form of behavior that media outlets, led by
The Washington Post, are engaging in.
