Thomas Frank, Le Monde diplomatique:
Protesting against a politician who insults the CIA is a notable innovation in left praxis. But its novelty is dwarfed by this remark on the Trump-CIA incident, made to the Post by former CIA director Michael Hayden: ‘Intelligence is about truth. The goal of an intelligence officer is to get as close to the truth as possible. Something I believe we have in common with the press.’
This is utterly fatuous and yet it is not wrong. In the Trump era, the press did indeed come to resemble what Washington calls the ‘intelligence community’. Hayden himself became an ‘analyst’ for CNN in 2017, as did James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence. Former CIA chief John Brennan became one for NBC. Countless other former spies made similar moves, speculating on TV about ‘disinformation’ and the occult power Vladimir Putin had over Donald Trump.
This brings us to Russiagate, once the all-absorbing nightmare of the Trump years, but today a labyrinthine story whose particular hysterical details no one cares to remember. Still, if we are to pursue our national quest for truth, we must revisit it one more time.
The basic element of the scandal was ‘collusion’: that Trump had in some way conspired with or been compromised by the Russian government as it tried to intervene in the 2016 election. Which was to say that Trump was not merely incompetent or crooked but the agent of a hostile foreign power.
There were hundreds of accusations along those lines, ranging from gullibility to treason. Future historians will get to sort out which pundit pushed which particular details of the story, how journalism’s rules got suspended, and how cable news used Russia-fear to build its audience. Here, let us stick to the essential matter: this was the singular news story of the Trump years, the subject that dominated the headlines, and always in the same way — revelations of the most shattering sort were just around the corner. But somehow never quite revealed. Special Counsel Robert Mueller brought several Republican officials to book for other offenses, but he prosecuted no one for coordination or conspiracy with the Russian government. His report concluded in March 2019: ‘Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities’ (5).
And so the most widely covered Trump scandal morphed into the ultimate journalism scandal. In their zeal to bring down a president they despised, the people of the press had given up any pretence of fairness or balance. They did not try to conceal this change, but rather spoke of it as a kind of breakthrough innovation made necessary by Trump’s constant lying. Journalism critic Matt Taibbi calls Russiagate ‘this generation’s WMD’ but on a grander level: ‘The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction’ (6).
Yet as scandals go, this one had few consequences. Not many of the commentators who got Russiagate wrong were punished for it. After all, Trump was a jerk, objectively speaking. And also, the journalists pursuing the story were merely doing what everyone else in journalism was doing, a circumstance in which professional practitioners are rarely held accountable.
