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.

Worth Watching: Something Old & Something New from YouTube

Here's something relatively new from Jordan Chariton of TYT that you may have missed:

And here's something that wasn't sufficiently appreciated at the time of its release:

Tough Love for TYT: UFO Report Deserves Rotten Tomatoes

I’m going to be critical of The Young Turks in this post because I love the show. 

No one paying attention to mainstream media right now can doubt the importance of alternative news programs such as Democracy Now! (featuring Amy Goodman) and TYT (featuring Cenk Uygur). 

These programs are labors of love requiring dedication and support from all sorts of people whose efforts I very much appreciate. 

TYT isn’t just informative; it’s genuinely fun to watch. And since TYT fans can tell a lot about each other simply by revealing which panelists they consider their favorites, I’ll confess that my favorite contributor isn’t Uygur or Ana Kasparian or John Iadarola. Everyone on the show does a great job, but my favorite is Jimmy Dore.

Maybe I’m giving Dore too much credit here, but I honestly think that if he had been on the show recorded Friday, April 8th, he would have prevented his co-panelists from delving so deeply into the Area 51 nonsense that the mainstream media bamboozled everyone (including the ordinarily astute Uygur) into embracing as the distraction du jour.[1]

 

As the editorial board of the New York Post observed back on March 25th, the Clintons have long used UFO speculation to distract attention from more substantive issues. When Hillary tossed out this chestnut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last month, the editors of the Post suggested that she merely sought to chew up time with idle chatter—time that might otherwise have been spent on questions concerning the FBI investigation into her use of a private server as Secretary of State. 

A separate article released by Mother Jones that same day began by noting how tiresome this diversionary tactic of the Clintons has become: “Once again, Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will discover as much as possible about government involvement in UFO research and share the information with the American people.” It's disappointing for Uygur to fall for such gambits when they have become obvious enough to warrant commentary even within mainstream media circles.

To Uygur’s credit, he recognized the Panama Papers as the most important story of the week when it broke. While the mainstream media stayed virtually mum, TYT did a commendable job of contrasting Bernie Sanders’ opposition to the U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement with Hillary Clinton’s support for it. Uygur’s takeaway point—that the agreement was about setting up tax havens, not improving economic relations—was courageously and compellingly articulated.

And yet when Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta gave an interview about his own interest (shared, of course, by Clinton) in revisiting the Area 51 files, Uygur lapped the story up just as uncritically as the mainstream media that he rightly excoriates for failing to do its job. 

Golly gee, Mr. Uygur, I wonder what Podesta’s motives could have been for giving that interview on Thursday? Do you think the timing may have had anything to do with the fact that the Podesta Group (co-founded by John and currently managed by his brother, Tony) handles public relations for Sberbank (the largest bank in Russia), which happens to be implicated in the Panama Papers scandal?

When politicians and their henchmen resort to such smoke-and-mirror ploys, we expect CNN to slobber all over the mirrors and FOX to choke itself on the smoke.

But we expect better from TYT. I love you guys, but I’ll love you even more if you refuse to allow yourselves to be drawn into these dead end tunnels in the future. We can get tunnel vision anywhere else. We rely on you for something different.

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[1] Kasparian wasn’t on the show either, so her fans can argue that she would have kept Uygur and Iadarola from dropping the ball as clumsily as they did. I’m open to that argument.