We rightly mock and deride right-wing conspiracy theorists and conservative media outlets for delivering what their hungry masses want to hear instead of providing facts, truth and reality.
I have long crusaded here against our own versions of these peddlers of spun garbage— the propagandists who sensationalize, contort and combine facts into conspiracies and false narratives.
Those who have been part of Daily Kos for a number of years will recall events like “Fitzmas” when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was reported (by a dubious source) to be on the verge of “frogmarching” Karl Rove out of the White House in handcuffs.
Never happened, of course, but Daily Kos was in full celebration mode as if it was a certainty. A few folks here who had backgrounds as journalists were more skeptical of these reports, particularly because the primary reporter on this story had a history of making definitive claims that never came true and which were rarely confirmed by other reputable sources. (I am purposely omitting the name of this reporter because, at the time, I expressed great skepticism of his “reporting” and incurred his wrath including receiving a note in my Kosmail account suggesting I “get cancer and die a slow, painful death.”)
Daily Kos has at times become enamored with people propagating conspiracy theories and falsehoods that we desperately want to be true. Greg Palast was one of those characters as was the much-beloved Keith Olbermann in one instance. These folks took great umbrage when called out for pushing falsehoods, or, at the very least, for stating as truth important “events” which had not been borne out by solid reporting or facts in evidence.
My position has always been that this community is best served by sticking to known facts, and, optimally, multiple sourcing on stories of great import. Speculation has always been a part of politics and a part of this community, but claiming a critical story is true requires solid evidence and confirmation from other reliable sources, not “wish-it-were-so” fake reporting from pseudo-journalists.
Which brings me to serial fabulist Seth Abramson. I have railed against Abramson here in the past (including as recently as December 18, 2020) for the reasons I cite, above. Nearly every Abramson “mega-tweetstorm” contains a kernel of truth that is then spun into some conspiracy or upcoming event that is certain to occur, according to his telling.
As I have noted in previous pieces about Abramson, someone who cranks out a dozen 60-100+ tweet “mega-tweetstorms” a week is bound to get something right once in every 30 tries just by virtue of his overwhelming output (a point I made, satirically, in my own “mega-twitstorm” in October 2017). But he is by no means a journalist, nor is he an expert in any sense of the word. There are many writers here who are much better journalists and much more knowledgeable subject matter experts (especially on law) than Seth Abramson who has somehow managed to garner nearly a million followers on Twitter — while peddling huge, steaming mounds of dung.
Abramson did receive a law degree and for a period was a practicing lawyer, but as he started drawing a crowd during the Russian investigation, his Twitter bio described him as being a “law professor.” He was not, and never has been, any such thing, and when I and others pointed it out, his claimed law professor credential disappeared.
Every time I have written about him here I get bombarded in the comment section from Abramson’s “true believers” who, for reasons I cannot fathom, view him as some sort of oracle on everything from the Russia investigation to the Capitol insurrection. He is not.
Abramson’s particular form of mendacity has been taken apart numerous times by people who do actual reporting for a living, including McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, Jacob Weindling in Paste, and and Colin Dickey in The New Republic.
A new piece out in Columbia Journalism Review by Lyz Lenz views Abramson’s tweets and books through the lenses of his personal history and actual journalism and finds both the man and his work wanting.
Lenz notes Abramson’s tendency to take a nugget of truth and turn it into a full-blown conspiracy:
On one occasion, Abramson claimed to have an inside source, which justified a theory that he posted about Trump and the Miss Universe pageant. Basically, the whole event was a setup through which Trump aimed to curry favor with Putin. In 2017, Abramson declared in a thread that this represented a violation of federal criminal statutes. A New Yorker story later reported on the pageant in depth, making note of Trump’s “willingness to embrace dubious partners” but, for lack of evidence, stopping short of identifying a crime. Later, the Mueller report likewise turned up no lawbreaking, only a lot of shady dealings with a lot of shady men. But the truth is a less satisfying sound bite than “Donald Trump violated civil forfeiture laws.” Abramson’s version went viral.
For a clearer picture of what has been reported about Trump and Russia, I called Greg Miller, a national security correspondent at the Washington Post, who won a Pulitzer in 2018 for his reporting on the subject. “What we know is that there was a crazy amount of disturbing contact, interaction, and kind of mutual affection—or admiration—between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign,” Miller told me. “And that is it. As far as we know, from the work of Robert Mueller and investigative journalists, there appears not to have ever been a formal agreement in writing or memorialized between Trump and Putin: You deliver me the White House and I’ll deliver your foreign policy shopping list.” It’s frustrating, Miller told me, when he sees his work wedged into a narrative that doesn’t hold up. But what can you do? Miller understands how the desire to believe that America is controlled by a nefarious foreign power has become entrenched in our national consciousness. But the evidence just isn’t there. When we spoke, Miller quoted from All the President’s Men: “These are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” Then he added, in the case of Trump, “They’re not only not that bright, but they are inordinately clueless and completely craven.”
This is classic Seth Abramson — creating a massive, illegal conspiracy where hard evidence of such a conspiracy has yet to be found.
No surprise, then, that his three books have been called Proof of Collusion (2018), Proof of Conspiracy (2019), and Proof of Corruption (2020), and yet his books don’t produce the proof he claims in his titles. He has parlayed his particular version of “journalism” into a lucrative snake oil business model that relies on his devoted true believers to retweet him and cite him as a source of reliable information at places like Daily Kos, all while he continues to peddle stories that some of us want so desperately to believe.
Which is what makes people like Seth Abramson so insidious.
We pillory the hard right fanatics who have fallen down the rabbit holes of QAnon and #StopTheSteal. They believe serial fabricators like Trump, the Fox News crew, Breitbart, Infowars and other outlets that peddle a steady stream of disinformation and conspiracy theory.
But we are not immune from these viruses.
And like many of these far right propagandists, Abramson also plays the eternal victim, being squelched by the heavy hands in the mainstream media. As Lenz notes:
How you see Abramson is a kind of Rorschach test. He is either a rogue pundit or a media darling. Over emails with me, he claimed that he’d been offered a job by Politico as a researcher and that he’d advised Cuomo Prime Time, Chris Cuomo’s CNN show. (Matthew Kaminski, the editor in chief of Politico, said that “rings no bells” and that he didn’t know Abramson. A CNN source replied, “Absolutely not.”) Abramson also told me that he felt major outlets kept him at a distance. On Twitter, he sometimes rails about being ignored by “mainstream media,” as he did this past fall, when he shared a reporter’s comment about a Russian misinformation campaign with a note: “Imagine how powerful it’d be,” he argued, if journalists would only remind people that his recent book dispelling “every” lie was a best seller.
And as Lenz summarizes:
Abramson has also held on to his pet theories. On his podcast, and in his first Proof book, he makes arguments based on the Steele dossier. (Remember the Steele dossier? You know, the pee tape thing.) The reliability of the Steele dossier is, to put it mildly, in question; a report by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found that the dossier was dubious, unvetted, and shady as hell. Of course, people still believe it and defend it—Abramson continues to cling to it uncritically—but the point is: it falls short of proof. Journalism, of the meta or curatorial sort, isn’t worth much if it can’t meet that standard. And that’s the trouble with Abramson’s interpretive threads. Pull on any one of them, and the whole tapestry unravels.
We can do better than Seth Abramson. He should not be cited as a source of fact at Daily Kos.