The Most Famous Report Nobody Has Read
Did the 2016 election suffer from middling meddling by the Russians or major muddling by the CIA?
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
For the past four years cable news has referred to CIA-FBI-NSA “evidence” that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And mimicking Hollywood’s penchant for cashing in on a big money-maker by producing sequels, these news outlets now suggest Russia is “probably” meddling again.
The report they draw from as proof of this accusation is “Background to Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution.” Assembled by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the report, only partially declassified, reveals the predisposed mindset American intelligence agencies have regarding Russia. It also shows how they draw only speculative conclusions from this biased perspective.
According to them, Russian meddling consists of stoking divisiveness in America. But why do news outlets reporting this phenomenon fail to mention forensic evidence within the report?
Election meddling or CIA muddling? Read the report and judge for yourself
Intelligence agency speculation about Russia comes from a culturally engrained perspective. They see criticizing the two-party electoral system and opposing the 1% donor class as “divisive.”
Intelligence agencies regularly lie to us: about the Gulf of Tonkin/Vietnam war, WMDs/Iraq war, etc. Still, even the boy who cried wolf got it right once. So the report’s findings deserve a clinical inspection.
It’s up to us to read their report, which the DNI refers to as analytical (probability) rather than forensic (conclusive). Despite that, CNN reporter-stenographers simply declare that “our intelligence community has told us so, and therefore it’s true.” Evidently, the devil is NOT in the details.
Here we focus on the parts of the report that allege RT America (formerly Russia TV) is a vehicle for election meddling.
Excerpt 1: DNI “evidence” of RT Russia meddling includes broadcasting views of third-party candidates and non-mainstream U.S. journalists
In an effort to highlight the alleged “lack of democracy” in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a “sham.”
Reporting on ideas beyond the two dominant parties should come from our own cable TV chains. But CNN, MSNBC and FOX fundamentally agree to exclude perspectives not situated within the ramparts of the Democrat-Republican duopoly.
Third parties are caught in a Catch-22. They have no chance to break through the poll-percentage barrier to qualify for televised presidential debates precisely because their ideas are squeezed out of televised coverage.
More than 45% of eligible American voters choose not to vote, while millions of other voters see elections as lesser-of-evils events. (Recent polls show 60% of Biden voters are not voting for him, but against Trump.) Thus, RT is mathematically accurate in reporting that at least a third of eligible American voters, what journalist Chris Hedges calls “the country’s largest voting bloc,” are marginalized.
Yes, RT America originates within Putin’s Russia, not a beacon of democracy, but it’s driven by a business model: to find willing viewers. It cannot compete for CNN viewers, so it flows naturally into air space left void by the major cable networks.
RT functions like other government-financed media, including the BBC, Deutsche-Welle (Germany), France-24, Al Jazeera and even PBS. In this sense, all state media professionals work under certain government constraints. For example, Tony Blair thwarted anti-Iraq war coverage by the BBC.
Yet the BBC does great reporting. The fact that RT works under Russian government constraints does not prevent it from doing professional journalism. Ask American media legend Larry King, who has an RT program. Ask Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges, who landed on RT after the mainstream U.S. media he’d worked for elbowed him out because of his anti-war stance.
The case of Jesse Ventura
Former Navy Seal and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura achieved the impossible when he ran as an independent to win the election for governor of Minnesota (1999–2003). Ventura often rails against the two-party duopoly and the military-industrial complex.
No one has ever questioned his patriotism. Yet Ventura’s program, “The World According to Jesse,” landed on RT America because mainstream media would have nothing of JV.
Does that mean Jesse is meddling?
In 2003 Ventura was awarded a three-year contract by MSNBC. However, when he stood against Republican-Democrat support for the Iraq war, MSNBC required him to retract his anti-war position to retain his program. Ventura refused, ultimately accepting paid compensation by the cable chain when they broke the contract. (The popular Phil Donahue was also fired from MSNBC for opposing the war.)
By excluding the likes of Ventura and Hedges, American media left a gaping void in the market. Stepping into this void involved a business decision, not only for RT but for other state-based international cable networks.
Al Jazeera (Qatar) has also done critical reporting on the two-party duopoly, so why is Qatar not in the meddling report? Al Jazeera vies for the same ignored viewer market.
American Intelligence agencies ignore that a large U.S. voting bloc already felt disenfranchised long before Al Jazeera or RT existed.
Excerpt 2: DNI “evidence” of RT Russia meddling includes reporting on U.S. citizens’ dissatisfaction their government’s institutions
Strategic Messaging for Russian Government RT’s criticism of the US election was the latest facet of its broader and longer-standing anti-US messaging likely aimed at undermining viewers’ trust in US democratic procedures and undercutting US criticism of Russia’s political system. RT Editor in Chief Margarita Simonyan recently declared that the United States itself lacks democracy and that it has “no moral right to teach the rest of the world” (Kommersant, 6 November). Simonyan has characterized RT’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement as “information warfare” that is aimed at promoting popular dissatisfaction with the US Government. RT created a Facebook app to connect Occupy Wall Street protesters via social media. In addition, RT featured its own hosts in Occupy rallies (“Minaev Live,” 10 April; RT, 2, 12 June).
By using the word “likely” (my emphasis), the DNI openly admits he is speculating rather than proving.
Did RT’s coverage of Occupy Wall Street “undermine” our trust in US democracy? Or is the fact that the USA “lacks democracy” a worthy news subject?
Twice in the past 20 years, the candidate with the most popular votes in the U.S. presidential election lost the presidential election. Additionally, voter suppression is well documented, as is rampant gerrymandering and the outsized influence corporate donors have on U.S. politicians.
RT’s documentary on Occupy Wall Street got only 10,000 views on Youtube (hardly a number to skyrocket the CIA Scare Meter), compared to 90,000 for a parallel Youtube documentary by the British newspaper The Guardian. Why is the UK not included in the foreign-meddling report?
Clearly the RT film does not “stoke division.” It presents demonstrators of all backgrounds working in harmony. The only possible “division” would be their legitimate antagonism toward the richest 1% following the bankster-propagated, subprime-mortgage scam.
By alleging that media coverage of Occupy Wall Street fomented divisiveness, the DNI exposes its own bias in favor of the wealthiest 1%.
American cable news coverage, such as CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and Erin Burnett, often mocked Occupy Wall Street. Their one-sidedness left a viewer niche for RT and other international media to pursue.
As one who participated in the international version of Occupy, I find it alarming that intelligence agencies backed by American cable news can suggest that my involvement was stoked by RT.
Fueled by their cable TV “clients,” intelligence agencies continue to draw speculative conclusions on election meddling based on their own prejudices. At the same time, these intelligence agencies meddle in foreign elections around the world.
Precious few of the Americans who fear Russian election meddling have read the DNI report or even seen details from it. The public has been clobbered by the unread report. The Military Media Industrial Complex has used the report for voter-shaming citizens who’ve found fault with American democracy, most of whom have never even heard of RT.
Most ironic, the attempts by Russian social media to stoke divisiveness in America have been feeble and ineffective, not at all needed by Donald Trump, who himself has mastered the art of catalyzing divisiveness.
