Gamers Repeat "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" with a Chuckle, but Journalists Repeat "We've Deployed the Recommended" with a Straight Face

On July 18th, Joe Uchill of The Hill turned a quotation from the DNC into gibberish by ending a sentence prematurely. Check out his final paragraph, which I have pasted below exactly as it appears in his article:

“Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April,” that statement read, “and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians. We’ve deployed the recommended.”

Again, that final period is Uchill's editorial insertion, not mine. The full sentence that he abridged into meaninglessness is a chestnut that first appeared in various media outlets (such as CNN) in mid-June: "We've deployed the recommended technology so that today our systems are secure thanks to a swift response to that attack and we will continue to monitor our systems closely."

So you're probably thinking: "What's the big deal? Uchill obviously made a mistake. It's a cut-and-paste error. Those happen all the time."

You're right. It isn't a big deal that Uchill made an error, but it is worth noting that other press outlets have simply repeated that error without commenting on it (or even noticing it).

Here's a passage from Michael Sainato's latest piece on Guccifer 2.0 for The Observer:

Instead of confirming or denying the validity of the documents, the DNC has reverberated the same tired excuse, claiming Russian hackers are responsible: “Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians. We’ve deployed the recommended.”

While the DNC and Clinton campaign have called for party unity, Clinton has continued the politically-expedient tactic of adopting several of Sanders’ popular ideas.

I don't have a problem with Sainato quoting Uchill, but I find it strange that he didn't bother to read the material he quoted--since anyone who reads "We've deployed the recommended" is bound to wonder what happened to the rest of the sentence.

Sainato isn't alone. Uchill's meaningless formulation was also repeated (without comment) by The Nagaland Post and Investment Watch.

This isn't just a case of Uchill making a mistake; it's a case of multiple journalistic outfits failing to recognize that mistake for what it is--probably because they all know better than to read anything inside a quotation attributed to the DNC.

Our journalists believe that their job is simply to repeat whatever our political parties tell them, not to evaluate quotations for accuracy or even intelligibility. Worse yet, since they know that whatever appears inside quotation marks from a political source is almost certainly a lie, they protect themselves from that dishonesty by NOT reading the material in question even as they are in the process of PRESENTING it to their audience.

This is the state of the fourth estate in America is 2016.

The DNC Has "Deployed the Recommended" to Deal with Guccifer 2.0--Whatever That Means

Joe Uchill of The Hill has written three articles about Guccifer 2.0 since July 13th. All three conclude in much the same way (by reminding readers that unidentified sources consider Guccifer 2.0 to be part of a Russian disinformation campaign).

Here's the final paragraph of "Guccifer 2.0 releases new docs" (7/13):

“Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April, and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians,” a senior DNC official said in a written statement.

Here's the antepenultimate paragraph of "Celeb phone numbers included in Guccifer 2.0 hack" (7/18):

Many have suggested that Guccifer 2.0 is a front for Vladimir Putin in the Russian leader’s efforts to influence American politics, something Guccifer 2.0 denies.

And here are the final two paragraphs of "New Guccifer 2.0 dump highlights 'wobbly Dems' on Iran deal" (7/18):

The DNC declined to issue a new comment but reiterated a prior statement from a senior official.

“Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April,” that statement read, “and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians. We’ve deployed the recommended.”

Note that the last conclusion is almost identical to the first. However, Uchill knows better than to conclude two out of three articles on the same subject in less than a week in exactly the same way. So he presents the illusion of changing things up by moving the attribution of his unnamed source to the middle of the paragraph and tacking on a puzzling piece of extra information: "We've deployed the recommended."

The recommended what? It seems as though the article ends on a challenge to the reader to fill in the blank--something that's very easy to do if we remember one of Guccifer 2.0's earlier leaks concerning "Reporter Outreach" strategies from the DNC: "pitch stories with no fingerprints and utilize reporters to drive a message."

I therefore suspect that if Uchill had included the final sentence of his latest conclusion in full, it would have read something like this: "We've deployed the recommended strategy of ensuring that reporters muddy the waters around Guccifer 2.0 by concluding every single article they write about the hacker with speculation about his being part of a Russian disinformation campaign."

Corporate Media Drains You of the Energy to Consume Anything but Corporate Media

Fellow American citizens, you are surrounded by clear-headed individuals who are using plain language to report on the world exactly as it is, but you'll never even notice these folks as long as you keep staring into the black hole of corporate news.

You know full well that the job of CNN is to distract you from troublesome facts and inconvenient information by ignoring some stories and coating others in a veneer of impotent moral outrage. You don't (and can't) expect Wolf Blitzer to diagnose the 2016 election with anything approaching lucidity. But since it's no trouble to turn on the tube and passively soak up lies and distortions, you let access-based reporters tell you how the world isn't instead of letting research-based journalists such as Chris Hedges tell you how it is, as in this excerpt from a recent article for TruthDig:

The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the “least worse” makes things worse.

People ignore such points out of convenience, not stupidity. It's easy to follow Hedges' logic, but even easier to have a newscast playing in the background while doing household chores. Why should you spend time reading thoughtful political commentary when the only result of doing so is the sense that you're now duty-bound to demand accountability in government?

Your job is hard. Your family is demanding. You're tired and you need a little downtime, so you drown out your own memories of how terrible the Clintons have been with fanciful narratives from MSNBC about how terrible Trump might be. You let Rachel Maddow spew nonsense into your ear instead of heeding Michael Howard when he writes:

[T]he notion that voting third party is a reckless and ultimately dangerous decision is losing its cogency, if it ever had any to begin with. Third-party voters—and hopefully there are many more of them this time around—understand that meaningful change in this country presupposes a subversion of our inveterate two-party (or two-factions-of-the-same-party) political system. By “holding your nose” and voting for Wall Street’s vetted candidate, you are casting a vote for the system itself, and you’re hindering real progress. And all for the sake of… what, exactly? Expediency? It’s always rich to hear establishment pundits charge the #NeverHillary crowd with myopia. Nothing could be further from the truth. In trying to establish a viable third party, one not subservient to the economic elite, these voters have an eye to the distant future, one in which the U.S. actually functions as a democracy. How short-sighted of them!

Do Hedges and Howard sound like petulant brats--or like adult human beings who have seen firsthand what we accomplish by electing the less obnoxious servant of plutocracy every four years?

The main lesson we should all have learned about Hillary Clinton by now is that she wouldn't be inevitable if we weren't already convinced of her inevitability. The important corollary of this lesson, however, is that we wouldn't be convinced of her inevitability if not for a few dozen highly paid, well-placed Clintonite mouthpieces assuring us of her inevitability 24/7.

Let's say that you're a person with a sweet tooth who is trying to lose weight. You take pains to eliminate all forms of candy and dessert from your house, but your paper boy starts including a complimentary chocolate doughnut with your daily paper. Is the paper boy helping you out--or tempting you to backslide into self-destructive behavior?

Now let's say that you're a person with limited free time trying to help build a better future. You take pains to educate yourself about political realities, but the New York Times and Washington Post and every other major news publication in the country keep inserting themselves into your Facebook feed with stories about how you had better settle for Clinton to avoid Trump. Are those news sources helping you out--or tempting you to backslide into self-destructive behavior?

We're killing each other. We're killing the world. We're killing ourselves. And the only reason we accept this reality is because the articles we read from the Wall Street Journal, the stories we hear from NPR, and the reports we soak up from cable news all tell us this is the way things have to be and that any attempt to bring change will only make things worse.

Please dig deep enough within yourself to find the energy required to tune that garbage out. Please don't allow the corporate shills to manufacture your consent for the destruction of your political voice.

Guccifer 2.0 and the Corporate Media's Credibility

If you googled Hillary Clinton over the weekend, you had a hard time finding mainstream stories about Guccifer 2.0 because they were all buried beneath layers of commentary on the birth of Clinton's newborn grandson Aidan.

That's not evidence of an elaborate plot to forge a media narrative; it's simply business as usual for our corporate news sources, which routinely privilege distractions over substance.

The limited coverage of the Guccifer 2.0 story appeared in news outlets such as Gawker and The Inquisitr and on fact-checking websites such as Snopes.

Guccifer 2.0 was barely mentioned (if at all) in more high-profile/mainstream publications, and the stories concerning the leak that did appear in such publications (e.g. Wired and The Wall Street Journal) focused far less on the content of what was made public than on arguments about culpability for the breach.

Here's a representative paragraph from the Wired article by Andy Greenberg:

But just as lurid as the leaked data has been the fingerpointing that came after. Earlier in the week, the security firm Crowdstrike, which the DNC brought in to remediate the breach, published a blog post claiming that a pair of hacker groups based in Russia and associated with the government’s intelligence apparatus carried out the intrusion. The post pointed to the specific malware and tactics linked with the Russian groups known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. Both have a history of hacking high-value international intelligence targets.

Note that Greenberg can't vouch for the veracity of CrowdStrike's assertions; his purpose here is merely to summarize what their website claims. This tone of responsible skepticism is the most striking distinction between the way the Guccifer 2.0 leak is being handled in the mainstream press and the way it is being handled in more partisan outlets.

The notoriously right-wing New York Post, for example, ran this headline on the 16th: Leaked document shows DNC wanted Clinton from start. The purpose of that article isn't to establish the authenticity of the Guccifer 2.0 leak, but to presume its authenticity and spin a specific point as negatively as possible against the likely Democratic nominee.

We saw a similar slant taken by the The New York Observer (owned by Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and therefore presumably more sympathetic to Trump than Clinton). On the 17th, the Observer ran this piece by Michael Sainato: Guccifer 2.0 Leak Reveals How DNC Rigged Primaries for Clinton.

The Sainato article is especially noteworthy because of its final paragraph, which reads more like an excerpt from a Bernie Sanders speech than a piece of journalism concerning cybercrime:

The Democratic primaries exhibited a stark disregard for the values endemic to democracy, nearly solidifying an oligarchy in which corporations and wealthy donors use the government as a means to perpetuate their own agendas. These interests circumvented democracy to help Hillary Clinton out-raise Bernie Sanders by over $80 million from Super-PACs. These are the companies who offshore thousands of American jobs, who pushed for a Wall Street bailout when their greed and recklessness delivered our country into the worst recession since the Great Depression, and who have destabilized foreign regions around the world through unnecessary military intervention. Hillary Clinton represents an extension of disastrous policies, and her coronation by Establishment Democrats ensures corruption and dirty politics will continue as the status quo for years to come.

Although The Observer isn't backing Sanders, egging Sanders supporters on in their resistance to Clinton could definitely play to Trump's advantage, so it's not hard to see why this article ends on such a polemical note.

Just think how the title of Sainato's piece would have been edited before appearing in something like The New York Times: "Guccifer 2.0 Leak (If Genuine) Suggests Premature Partnership between DNC and Clinton."

But The New York Times didn't run any such headline because it wasn't interested in the Guccifer 2.0 story.

The Grey Lady's editors may, as many Sanders supporters suspect, have chosen to ignore this story because they think it would be too damaging to their darling candidate.

But what if they're ignoring the Guccifer 2.0 leak because they have good reason to believe it's a hoax?

This possibility keeps nagging me as I see prominent alternative media analysts (including Jordan Chariton and Jimmy Dore of TYT) arguing that the Guccifer 2.0 leak must be authentic simply because the DNC refuses to go on record denying its authenticity.

I love the zeal of Chariton and Dore, but I urge all Sanders supporters to proceed with extreme caution concerning anything on the Guccifer 2.0 website. So much of the leaked information is a matter of public record that we should be skeptical about anything that isn't already part of the public record--such as a letter that neatly confirms all the suspicions of outraged Sanders supporters being posted on a newly launched website by some unknown person/people claiming to have hacked the DNC.

C'mon guys--let's calm down.

Less than five years ago, CrowdStrike's president (Shawn Henry) used the notorious LulzSec/AntiSec hacker Sabu to deceive the world when both he (Henry) and his informant (Sabu) worked for the FBI. It is therefore entirely possible that Henry is using Guccifer 2.0 to deceive us in the same way.

Remember that CrowdStrike officially works for the DNC, not the public interest. The DNC has, under our noses, mounted a months-long disinformation campaign concerning Hillary Clinton. That disinformation campaign has largely failed because its primary vehicle (the corporate media) is widely distrusted by the American public.

Please consider the obvious ways in which the Guccifer 2.0 leak--if it proves to be a hoax--will simultaneously discredit all the alternative media sources that embraced it and restore credibility to the mainstream corporate news entities that ignored it.

Again, proceed with caution.

Ubiquitous Unanimity

Now that the New York Daily News has released a transcript of the interview between its own editorial board and Hillary Clinton, we can expect to see various mouthpieces of the Clintonite media empire scurrying to reach identical conclusions about the interview in cosmetically different ways.

Time set the tone for this forthcoming consensus last night by pronouncing Clinton a “wonk’s wonk.” 

We can therefore count on seeing that point of view echoed today and throughout the week in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

Those publications all fell happily in line when Clinton’s surrogates tried to convince us to regard her admission that she is not a “natural politician” as evidence of charming and vulnerable candor.

This is how the illusion of widespread consensus about Clinton is created and maintained.

In reality, people think of Clinton as a lying liar who lies. But media shills from The Los Angeles Times to The Guardian like to assure us, over and over again, that she is “fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”

It doesn’t matter how many real human beings respond to such puff pieces with scorn and derision. The people in the Beltway bubble don’t think the comments on such shill pieces indicate anything about public attitudes concerning Clinton. They seem genuinely to believe that as long as the Clinton campaign can get the right headlines into the newspapers and footage of the right distractions into nightly news broadcasts, it can displace the reality we experience firsthand with whatever narrative it chooses to promote.

The problem is that we aren’t interested in any of these clumsily coordinated pushes to achieve ubiquitous unanimity concerning Clinton in the media.

So what if Clinton is a wonk's wonk? No one doubts her ability to grasp fine nuances of policy decisions. More importantly, however, no one doubts that her purpose in paying such tremendous attention to policy detail is to find a talking point that she can use to distract the American people as they are fleeced by the donor class.

So when we hear, as we doubtless will, from major news outlets all over the country, that Clinton is boring to readers because she has too comprehensive an understanding of government policy, that assertion will only be half true.

Clinton's candidacy is boring. But it’s not because of her wonkishness. It’s because her media lackeys keep playing these games of distraction and narrative manipulation instead of confronting her glaring and deeply troubling inadequacies as a candidate. If someone forced you to play the same tedious game of charades since 1992, wouldn't you be a little bit bored by now?

For Those Living Inside the Corporate Echo Chamber

Sometimes the financially expedient choice is also the ethical choice, as when people refuse to pay for their own brainwashing.

The main argument I hear for cutting the cord is that doing so will lower your bills without limiting your access to quality programming that is readily available via hulu, Amazon, or other streaming services.

But there’s a more important reason to cut the cord: Going cold turkey on cable television means no more FOX on a loop, no more CNN on a loop, no more MSNBC on a loop. 

If you’re living in that corporate echo chamber right now as a true blue Democrat, you’re hearing no less a luminary than Rachel Maddow insist that the Sanders campaign should be doing more to raise money for down-ticket Democrats.

Maddow may not be conscientious, but she is conscious. She knows that in addition to its own fundraising capabilities, the Clinton campaign can count on support from many Democratic incumbents and party officials who will be receiving (or have already received) cash infusions from the same people who are already bankrolling Clinton’s super PACs.

Maddow's line of questioning exposes that she, like Clinton, is completely tone-deaf to those of us who keep sending our money to Sanders because he isn’t bought off by the same interests that exert so much influence over Clinton. Telling us that Clinton is better for Democrats because she can distribute payola to her crony underlings better than Sanders can is tantamount to saying, “Hey Bernie, we’re really starting to see the limitations of your grassroots campaign in terms of your inability to deliver sufficient cash incentives to Democratic incumbents for their support. What gives, bud?”

Never mind that Sanders will achieve far more than Clinton could dream of achieving for down-ticket candidates simply by turning out enthusiastic droves of progressive and independent voters (who will be eager to install any candidates sympathetic to the Sanders agenda). Never mind that the Sanders campaign has more important things to think about than down-ticket races just now, such as winning delegates and developing a strategy for the convention (since the true mathematical situation, which the corporate media is forbidden to discuss, is that neither candidate is currently likely to clinch the nomination before the convention). Never mind that given the incredible obstacles the Sanders campaign has overcome so far, Maddow’s question suggests that if she had rowed out to interview Gertrude Ederle in 1926 while the swimmer was making her way across the English Channel, she would have begun by flinging Ederle a rope from her dinghy and asking for a tug back to shore. “You’ve shown tremendous strength and resilience to this point in your efforts, Ms. Ederle,” Maddow would begin, “but the real question is, ‘Why aren’t you showing even more strength and resilience?’”

If anything, the main story of the upcoming week should concern the laughable disconnect between establishment tools (ranging from the talking heads of corporate media to the political figures those heads talk incessantly about) and the electorate. Those of us who are talking to each other face-to-face and online know very well that we are not figments of anyone's imagination (as is so often the case with the implied audience addressed by the media). We also know that the major news outlets are all uninterested in the subjects that interest us. 

We’re stepping outside the strange bubble of corporate news—a bubble in which nonsense is simply repeated until it substitutes for truth despite never having been accepted as true. We hear the talking heads explain that Hillary will somehow make the world safer from terrorism by working diligently to promote the conditions in which terrorism thrives. We may not accept this lunacy ourselves, but we come away with the impression that somewhere out there, people do accept it.

No one accepts it—not after they cut the cord. 

And that’s a good thing. Those of us who can’t get mainstream coverage of the Sanders campaign end up watching great stuff like this on YouTube:

Instead of watching Sanders discuss important issues, those of you who are still stuck in the establishment media bubble will spend the early part of the week talking about such nothingburger material as how 1) Clinton struggled with a MetroCard while trying to board a New York subway (linked via FOX); 2) SNL did a slapsticky sketch about the incident (linked via CNN); and 3) Clinton jokingly blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio for this infrastructural failing of his city (linked via MSNBC).

It doesn’t matter whether this media narrative makes you think of Clinton negatively (“She’s clumsy!”) or positively (“I like a candidate who can chuckle at herself!”). Either way, the corporate tools will encourage you to spend time imagining that this subway nonsense is somehow relevant to the election in November. But it isn’t relevant, and its purpose is to be irrelevant. Stories like this are never about Clinton; they are always about ensuring that political discussion remains unrelated to matters of policy.

Cutting the cord means making this stuff painfully obvious to yourself and everyone you live with.

Try it. And please get the people you love in New York to try it before April 19th.