On Fake News and Russian Collusion

In a recent interview in AcTIVism, Glenn Greenwald, one of few people Edward Snowden agreed to speak to, shamed other countries that benefited from Snowden's revelations but refused to grant him safe passage. Because of Snowden, many are taking means to protect their personal privacy online, but his revelations had an even bigger impact on our relationship with government. Fewer people trust government anymore. At all.


On the other hand, media support for Assange and Wikileaks "has more or less evaporated now that they see him . . . as an arm of Russian intelligence, which is something they say with great regularity notwithstanding the fact that there is no evidence for it." Assange interfered in the political process, but so do all journalists who cover an election: "it's called reporting." He published confidential documents, but "The New York Times published Donald Trump's tax returns even though they had no idea who sent it to them."

I think the main attack on Wikileaks has been to say that they have too much power and along with that they work with the Russian government. But again, I mean, for decades the New York Times was the place where every major national security leak ended up. When Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times that was the argument of the Nixon administration used to try and get the Supreme Court to censor them as why should the editor of the New York Times have so much power that he gets to decide which government secrets are published and which ones remain concealed. And the answer is: That's what a free press does. . . . So if we’re going to accept the theory that Julian Assange has too much power because he gets to make decisions about what's published and what isn't, then again you're stripping away first amendment or free press protections from every working investigative journalist, and I don't think that's something that any of us want to do.

The Mueller investigation is ongoing, but we don't yet have any evidence that anyone criminally conspired with the Russians to interfere in the election.

"Thus far, the Mueller probe has produced no indictments, no convictions and no evidence relating to let alone demonstrating any of that to be the case. . . . Jonathan Karl who is the chief White House correspondent of ABC, just 4 days ago said that the Mueller report when it comes is highly likely to be anti-climatic."

Then he gets into the inaccurate stories being published in U.S. media, like when BuzzFeed reported that Trump directed Cohen to lie a couple weeks ago, which was false.

"So, over and over and over again, it's the kind of reporting that basically led to the American public believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons . . . these stories are falling apart because they are published with no evidence, simply because intelligence officials who are trained to lie, who are born to lie, tell these media officials to go say it, and they obediently go and say it. And then it reverberates all around the world. . . . The US media outlets are very, very adept, and acting with extreme levels of melodramatic outrage whenever they're called fake news, they declare these insults to be a grave threat to democracy. . . . But they spend almost no time, unfortunately, asking themselves why those attacks resonate, why faith in media institutions has collapsed, why Trump thinks it is a good strategy to turn the media into his enemy. . . . There is a general loss of faith in the ruling class institutions. . . . And the ruling class seems to be responding, including the media class, by calling everybody names who expresses dissatisfaction, but spending very little time engaging in self-critique or self-analysis. And until they start figuring out what it is that they're doing that's causing a lot of these political developments, I think things are only going to continue to get worse." 

Shortly after the interview, Greenwald made a listicle to bring some clarity on this issue in The Intercept: "Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story."

"Note that all of these “errors” go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle’s connection to it. It’s inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that’s being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its “errors” went in that direction, virtually all of its major “errors” in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script."

In an article about Greenwald written a year ago, "Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller?" Simon van Zuylen-Wood said,

"Rather than see Trump as a product of a rotten power structure, as Greenwald does, and the 2016 election as a wild reaction against that power structure, as Greenwald also does, it was easier for most American liberals to frame his victory as an accident. And rather than look within to eradicate the conditions that wrought Trump, it was more comforting to pin his rise on an external foe."

Unfortunately, if we accepted what Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out in "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds," then it doesn't matter that Greenwald is busy pointing out all these errors:

"Once formed, impressions are remarkably perseverant. . . . Even after the evidence 'for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs.' . . . Humans' biggest advantage over other species is our ability to cooperate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve teh problems posed by living in collaborative groups." 

Reason evolve in humans to "prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group" but, now with huge innovations and social media and globalization, Kolbert says,

"the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up. . . . As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance. . . . When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering. Where it gets us into trouble is in the political domain. . . . people experience genuine pleasure--a rush of dopamine--when processing information that supports their beliefs. 'It feels good to stick to our guns even if we are wrong.'"

We don't need to understand how our phones work in order to use them, but we follow that same logic when we form opinions about immigration or Russian collusion with an imperfect, or completely inaccurate, understanding of how it all works.

Greenwald's solution is individual action:

"And so I think the number one duty of a citizen is to make certain that no matter who it is that is telling you something, no matter how much you think they’re trustworthy, no matter how politically aligned they are with you, that you not believe things until you see actual evidence for them. That if a government makes a claim, don’t be satisfied to put your faith or trust in that political official as though they’re a figure of the church unless they show you the documentary evidence that you can look at and evaluate and see for yourself. When you read something online, don’t believe it unless there is evidence presented for it. I think the most important thing is for citizens to develop and apply critical thought processes to everyone and everything. As long as they can continue to do that, the ability of people to deceive and mislead will gradually weaken."

Good luck with that. Nobody's got time to do that level of digging while they catch up on the news at  breakfast. Instead, what I do, and what I encourage students to do, is to carefully follow a few people who seem reasonable and who will do my digging for me. Greenwald is one of them. And then, from time to time, search up criticisms of them. There are always criticisms, but whether or not they made minor errors or allowed huge issues to pass without correction is the determining factor in whether or not we continue to believe them. And we have to accept that sometimes the whole truth doesn't come out for a few years. We have to remain skeptical and take a few steps back from it until someone like Jared Diamond or Chris Hedges writes a book.

Greenwald sums up with concerns with frightening voting trends worldwide:

"So unless we start asking ourselves what is it about the ruling class philosophy of neoliberalism and militarism that is making so many people so desperate and angry that they are turning to extremists and charlatans and con artists and frauds as long as they’re just positioned outside of the power structure. Until we start asking ourselves that question in a very honest and constructive way to figure out how to change it, we can stomp our feet all we want, we can call everybody racist who are supporting these people, or fascist, we can march in the street if we want. But as long as we have democracy and support an ideology that is destroying the futures of tens of millions of people, they’re going to continue to vote in ways that we don’t like. And although it might be more satisfying to call people names or to denounce people using very harsh labels, it just doesn’t seem to me very constructive. And so if the idea is to figure out how to stop this movement, then necessarily one has to evaluate the alternative and the flaws in that alternative and how to make it more appealing and more attractive."

We don't have the left of Tommy Douglas or Roosevelt anymore. And we desperately need that back.