Don't Believe Anonymous Governmental Sources

In discussing the media with my classes I find it very helpful to use Chomsky and Hermann's Propaganda Model of the Media. This framework, first articulated in 1988 in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, consists of five filters that Chomsky and Hermann argue shape the way the media functions on the West. The third of these filters is Sourcing which involves the media relying on a limited range of sources for their reporting. Furthermore, these sources tend to be governmental officials or PR reps for large corporations meaning that most stories in the Mainstream Media are spun in favor of these governmental and corporate interests.

The reasons for the existence of this filter are complex, and beyond the scope of this blog post, but I did want to focus on a recent example of this filter in action. This comes from The Sunday Times (a Rupert Murdoch owned paper, see the first filter) published on June 14, 2015. The article in question "British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese" (paywalled here, full text here) claims that Russian and Chinese have obtained the documents stolen by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, cracked the encryption, with the resulting information threatening British spies, and thereby damaging national security. The key problem with this article, and the reason I am writing about it is that the entire report appears to be based solely on claims made by senior government official who remain anonymous.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, most of the claims made by these anonymous officials are demonstrably false, and the fact that the Sunday Times printed them without bothering to engage in any fact-checking shows how debased and corrupt the mainstream media is. As Greenwald puts it:

The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The “journalists” who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. It’s pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and we’re obeying. Breaking!

 As Greenwald goes on to note, the real issue here is that in granting these individuals anonymity, there is no way for anyone to analyze or verify these claims. For all we know (and as seems likely) these individuals were just making stuff up in order to smear Edward Snowden. Because they are hiding behind anonymity, there is no way to evaluate their claims, or hold them accountable if they are in fact lying. Greenwald again:

The official accusers are being hidden by the journalists so nobody can confront them or hold them accountable when it turns out to be false. The evidence can’t be analyzed or dissected because there literally is none: they just make the accusation and, because they’re state officials, their media servants will publish it with no evidence needed. And as is always true, there is no way to prove the negative. It’s like being smeared by a ghost with a substance that you can’t touch.

As Greenwald goes on to note, the problem is compounded when other media outlets pick up and repeat the story, amplifying the lies and misinformation promulgated by the Sunday Times and these anonymous governmental officials. The take away from all of this is provided once again by Greenwald:

Ponder how dumb someone has to be at this point to read an anonymous government accusation, made with zero evidence, and accept it as true.

In closing, I leave you with Stephen Colbert's analysis of this phenomena from his masterful performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner (jump to 10:45):

Why Politico Doesn't Like Snowden

This image from the dead tree edition of Politico basically says everything there is to say about the relationship between the government and the media:

Though I am sure they would claim independence, it is impossible to imagine that the large amount of advertising money Politico receives from ATEC doesn't influence the content. For those not in the know, ATEC is a unit of the US Army responsible for testing and evaluating equipment. So, Politico takes some amount of advertising dollars from a company funded the US Government and then publishes a story that essentially takes the government line on Edward Snowden, namely that he is a traitor. Furthermore, if one looks at Politico's coverage of Snowden, it generally seems to be consistent with the position taken by the US Government.

All in all, this is a great illustration of the second and third filters in Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media.

h/t to Digby

NYTimes and WaPo cover up for the Government

In a story reported in the UK Guardian yesterday and repeated all across the interwebs, we can see another example of how the mainstream media in the US is increasingly little more than a propaganda arm of the US Government. The story in question concerns the existence of a "secret" base in Saudi Arabia from which the US launches many of its drone attacks in the Middle East. As we all know, there are many situations where a journalist would rightly withhold information from her readers. The obvious example is where a reporter has information about US troop deployments but refrains from publishing that information because it would be very helpful to our enemies and damaging to US troops. But, what is the rationale for hiding the location of this base from the American public?

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post made the usual claims about withholding this information for reasons of national security, but as David Sirota reports, a close look at these rationalizations reveals some important truths about the collusion between these media outlets and the government. The New York Times public editor discussed the decision to withhold the information with the editor of the paper, Dean Baquet. The key part of the discussion is as follows:

The government’s rationale for asking that the location be withheld was this: Revealing it might jeopardize the existence of the base and harm counterterrorism efforts.  ”The Saudis might shut it down because the citizenry would be very upset,” he said.
Mr. Baquet added, “We have to balance that concern with reporting the news.”

As Sirota notes, this amounts to the editor admitting that he withheld information from the public because reporting that information might have led citizens to demand a change in governmental policy. He is literally saying that they withheld that information because an informed public would have been inconvenient to the US government! As Gawker's Adrien Chen noted:

The Washington Post and the New York Times revealed today that they were among a number of news organizations that participated in a blackout regarding the location of a "secret" CIA drone base in Saudia Arabia at the behest of the Obama Administration. But it turns out that base had already been reported months earlier—including by Fox News. In the case of the Saudi drone base, the Times and the Post weren't protecting a state secret: They were helping the CIA bury an inconvenient story. 

All of this nicely supports the Propaganda Model of Media described by Noam Chomsky and E.S. Hermann in their seminal work Manufacturing Consent. In this work they discuss five "filters" that shape the content of much of the media in the US. One of these filters concerns the limited range of sources that the media relies on. In this case, the media is essentially only relying on governmental officials, and in order to get those government officials to talk to them, many reporters will be very deferential in allowing those sources to dictate how and when that information can be used. And this is exactly what we see on the part of the New York Times and the Washington Post who deliberately buried an important story and important information so that they wouldn't piss off their government sources.

As always, Glenn Greenwald has a great deal more to say on this important topic.