Of the many disturbing examples of media malpractice in the Trump era, none are so alarming as the press’s unswerving deference to current and former members of the intelligence community. They can be perjurers, power abusers, perhaps even killers-by-drone, but as long as they oppose President Trump, they can expect journalists to give them a sympathetic ear.
For partisan operatives such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, both of whom lied to Congress under oath about consequential matters, media coverage has never been so friendly.
Politico’s Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman, for example, authored a report this week that claimed, of all things, that “Brennan has not been accused of lying to Congress.”
This is astonishing and easily disproven. Politico quietly corrected the false claim with no editor’s note, probably because its editors felt so stupid for having published it in the first place.
The since-deleted assertion came in the broader context of reporting that White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said recently, “John Brennan lied before Congress when he got caught spying” on Americans. What Gidley said is true. Brennan spied on members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, lied about it before Congress, and was later caught in his own lies. Worse still, Brennan got away with it, and he has reinvented himself since as a general in the anti-Trump #Resistance army for which he now enjoys a cushy career as a media pundit and a rehabilitated public image thanks to journalists who are either ignorant or in on it.
It would be one thing if Politico’s shilling for Brennan represented a single example of bad reporting that favored an anti-Trump voice with ties to the intelligence community. But it does not. Increasingly, newsrooms are conducting public relations for current and intelligence officials, repeating statements from known liars such as Brennan as fact without applying even minimal scrutiny.
In fact, the press’s reverence for those with ties to the intelligence community is one of the main reasons why the Russian “collusion” news cycle, which lasted more than two years, was so riddled with reporting errors. The narrative that Trump was installed in the White House by the Kremlin thrived for so long in large part because journalists consistently repeated all sorts of faulty tips and leaks from supposed intelligence operatives.
The press’s hyping of men like Clapper happened even as Clapper himself allowed for things like the bogus “17 intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacking” news cycle to go unchecked – until he was forced under oath to correct the record. He probably did not want to tempt fate with another opportunity for a perjury prosecution. Clapper also told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd that there was no FISA application involving Trump or his campaign, sparking yet another round of “bombshell” news headlines. This also turned out to false. Todd never once asked Clapper to explain himself. Meanwhile, you had men like Brennan appearing regularly on cable news during the “collusion” news cycle to leverage their professional credentials to accuse Trump of treason. In the end, after all of this from Clapper, Brennan, and others, the story ended when Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that his 40 agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, and 500 witness interviews could not “establish that the members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities” and that they could not find enough evidence “to establish that the president committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”
Journalist Matt Taibbi this year explored the press’s Trump-era elevation of the intelligence community, arguing that it has allowed for things like the error-riddled “Russian collusion” narrative to flourish.
“The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources,” reads an excerpt from his Hate Inc. “Too often, it felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to take the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no sense of institutional self-esteem about this.”
Taibbi uses a good term to describe a great deal of “collusion” reporting: “Slavish stenography.”
“Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that route?” he asks.
“This posture has all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan … need the press to whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don’t have better things to do than that ‘work’?” Taibbi adds.
He also made this obvious point: There is no reason on God’s green Earth for why a reporter should take an intelligence official at their word, especially if it is a known liar such as Clapper or Brennan. And yet there is a mountain of such examples and they all seem to point in one direction politically.
