America's Righteous Russia-gate Censorship

From Consortium News

A stark difference between today's Washington and when I was here as a young Associated Press correspondent in the late 1970s and the early 1980s is that then -- even as the old Cold War was heating up around the election of Ronald Reagan -- there were prominent mainstream journalists who looked askance at the excessive demonization of the Soviet Union and doubted wild claims about the dire threats to U.S. national security from Nicaragua and Grenada.

Perhaps the Vietnam War was still fresh enough in people's minds that senior editors and national reporters understood the dangers of mindless groupthink inside Official Washington, as well as the importance of healthy skepticism toward official pronouncements from the U.S. intelligence community.

Today, however, I cannot think of a single prominent figure in the mainstream news media who questions any claim -- no matter how unlikely or absurd -- that vilifies Russian President Vladimir Putin and his country. It is all Russia-bashing all the time.

And, behind this disturbing anti-Russian uniformity are increasing assaults against independent and dissident journalists and news outlets outside the mainstream. We're not just entering a New Cold War and a New McCarthyism; we're also getting a heavy dose of old-style Orwellianism.

Sometimes you see this in individual acts like HuffingtonPost taking down a well-reported story by journalist Joe Lauria because he dared to point out that Democratic money financed the two initial elements of what's now known as Russia-gate: the forensic examination of computers at the Democratic National Committee and the opposition research on Donald Trump conducted by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

HuffingtonPost never contacted Lauria before or after its decision to retract the story, despite a request from him for the reasons why. HuffPost editors told a BuzzFeed reporter that they were responding to reader complaints that the article was filled with factual errors but none have ever been spelled out, leaving little doubt that Lauria's real "error" was in defying the Russia-gate groupthink of the anti-Trump Resistance. [A version of Lauria's story appeared at Consortiumnews.com before Lauria posted it at HuffPost. If you want to sign a petition calling on HuffPost to restore Lauria's article, click here.]

Muzzling RT

Other times, the expanding American censorship is driven by U.S. government agencies, such as the Justice Department's demand that the Russian news outlet, RT, register under the restrictive Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires such prompt, frequent and detailed disclosures of supposed "propaganda" that it could make it impossible for RT to continue to function in the United States.

This attack on RT was rationalized by the Jan. 6 "Intelligence Community Assessment" that was, in reality, prepared by a handful of "hand-picked" analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. Their report included a seven-page addendum from 2012 accusing RT of spreading Russian propaganda -- and apparently this Jan. 6 report must now be accepted as gospel truth, no questions permitted.

However, if any real journalist actually read the Jan. 6 report, he or she would have discovered that RT's sinister assault on American democracy included such offenses as holding a debate among third-party candidates who were excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates in 2012. Yes, allowing Libertarians and Greens to express their points of view is a grave danger to American democracy.

Other RT "propaganda" included reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and examining the environmental dangers from "fracking," issues that also have been widely covered by the domestic American media. Apparently, whenever RT covers a newsworthy event -- even if others have too -- that constitutes "propaganda," which must be throttled to protect the American people from the danger of seeing it.

If you bother to study the Jan. 6 report's addendum, it is hard not to conclude that these "hand-picked" analysts were either stark-raving mad or madly anti-Russian. Yet, this "Intelligence Community Assessment" is now beyond questioning unless you want to be labeled a "Kremlin stooge" or "Putin's useful idiot." [An earlier State Department attack on RT was equally ridiculous or demonstrably false.]

And, by the way, it was President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who testified under oath that the analysts from the three agencies were "hand-picked." That means that they were analysts personally selected by Obama's intelligence chiefs from three agencies -- not "all 17" as the American public was told over and over again -- and thus were not even a full representation of analysts from those three agencies. Yet, this subset of a subset is routinely described as "the U.S. intelligence community," even after major news outlets finally had to retract their "all 17" canard.

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