In an article from January 12, 2017, before Donald Trump was even inaugurated, Seth Abramson discussed a terrifying fear many of us have — the suppression of the media by the new administration. Abramson is an attorney, Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire, Harvard graduate … and his work has appeared in news groups including the The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone...
The aforementioned piece appears in The Huffington Post and is titled: Why Won’t American Media Fully Investigate What Could Be The Biggest Story In U.S. Political History. Rather than dissect or comment on Abramson’s piece, I've opted to excerpt quotes, and greatly encourage reading his full analysis, which in my opinion represents the core of where the media needs to stand — investigative, questioning and fearless.
In January Abramson begins asking the question, “what percentage chance that the incoming president has been compromised by a hostile foreign power — is acceptable?” and observes, “Democrats and Republicans in D.C., along with almost the entirety of mainstream American media are now answering this question, by ignoring it altogether.”
“Meanwhile, the media apparatus of our nation’s closest ally, England, has taken an entirely different approach: they’re reporting doggedly on the story, comparing the credibility of its two main players—former FBI asset and top MI6 agent Christopher Steele, and serial exaggerator and compulsive liar Donald Trump—and playing out various scenarios, including the possible impeachment of Trump not long after he is inaugurated.
Around the same time as The Guardian was pondering aloud how and whether Trump could be impeached for high crimes, the U.S. Speaker of the House was on CNN saying that the story of Trump’s possible compromising by a foreign power is so insignificant that it shouldn’t even be mentioned in U.S. media.”
Abramson asks why are the Brits looking out for Americans so much more than our own elected officials and media outlets and he concludes here in America “one is told by top government officials to not even ask the question, and officials themselves are refusing to do so.” Abrams says in the midst of scary times,
“It behooves us to compare British and American reports on Trump’s Russian controversy and try to determine (a) how we as citizens in a democracy should expect the story to be covered, and (b) what market forces in American media might be preventing our cable and network news, and many of our newspapers, from doing their jobs.”
He believes “the reason to ask these questions is that the intelligence services we rely upon to investigate questions such as this are less likely to feel the pressure to do so from our elected officials if our elected officials aren’t feeling pressure from the media—and therefore, in effect, from the American people.”
Abramson reminds us that Donald Trump repeatedly lied during the Republican primary, the general election and continues to lie during the presidential transition period. Abramson notes “On the issue of the memos written by Christopher Steele from months of human intelligence work with trusted Russian sources — ”Trump claims the memos are ‘100 percent false’ but has already lied about them repeatedly.” Abramson beckons his readers to compare Mr. Trump to Mr. Steele. Steele is a man who was trusted to do extensive work by the FBI and who rose in the ranks at MI6 to run their Russia desk. He has been described (in The Guardian) by former UK government officials as ‘one of the more eminent Russia specialists for MI6’: credible, sober, cautious, and meticulous. Steel is also know to have a formidable record and his an experienced and highly regarded professional. Steele continued trying to get the memos into the hands of journalists and Congressmen long after he was no longer in the Republicans’ (or anyone’s) employ,”
More recently, says Abramson, on the subject of Trump, rather than Steele—Rolling Stone reported that American intelligence has advised Israel not to transmit sensitive data to the Trump administration, as the Russians have ‘leverages of pressure’ to use against Trump. Abramson says, “If one of our closest allies refusing to send us intelligence because our government may be run by Russian puppets isn’t a constitutional crisis, nothing is.” He cautions, “All of which means the Steele memos must be fully investigated now. Not the day after tomorrow, not in a week, not in a month. Now.”
Abramson points out that only three people in America seemed to be convinced Christopher Steele willfully authored a fictitious information. He names Trump, Sean Spicer, and Kellyanne Conway, “all people who could face charges for conspiracy to commit treason, or worse, if even a portion of Steele’s 35-page document is accurate.”
In this CNN video below the fold, a former CIA officer for Moscow claims the Steele dossier against Trump are “exactly how the Russians operate.”
“Why is Chuck Todd of NBC calling the Steele document “false information?” Abramson asks. He also questions why Andrea Mitchell is calling it a ‘smear campaign,’ and “NBC reporting that the 35 pages of human intelligence gathered by Steele from Russian sources long considered reliable by him (and frequently relied upon by the United Kingdom) is ‘disinformation’.” What evidence do Todd and Mitchell have to support their claims? Abramson believes the strange behavior is partly because instead of covering what multiple experts on cable news have already called the greatest story in U.S. political history if true, CNN is engaged in a “feud with the Trump team.”
“Who cares about this feud?” asks Abramson. Major networks “watched with dismay as CNN’s Jim Acosta got frozen out of Trump’s Wednesday news conference and publicly tarred as a purveyor of ‘fake news.’ Yet, Trump sent Kellyanne Conway out on the Seth Meyers’ program on the same day to say that her boss knew nothing about the report until it appeared on Buzzfeed.”
“But perhaps American media is intimidated by a President-elect so unpredictable that he’ll call a news organization ‘fake news’ for correctly reporting a story he himself lied about?”
He says, when a news network repeatedly frames the news in a way that directly contradicts its own reporting, something is wrong, adding,“It’s beginning to become a real concern for those Americans hoping that the memos written by a long-reliable source like Christopher Steele will be accurately covered by the U.S. media.” Abramson mentions that MSNBC reporting that the memos were “disinformation” is unacceptable journalism, as that term, again, “denotes propaganda deliberately developed to mislead readers.” Neither MSNBC, nor any other television network, nor anyone in the intelligence community in the U.S., has determined all of Steele’s memos are untrue.
Abramson adds, “The only way the Steele memos could be considered “disinformation” is if the U.S. intelligence community had evidence that Steele’s sources in Russia—developed over a decades-long career as a spy, and found repeatedly to be reliable by the United States—were in fact Kremlin agents.” But MSNBC did not have such information or it would have reported it, and it would have been “a bombshell.” Instead with no evidence, MSNBC continued to use the word “disinformation” throughout the day. The reality is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wrote in a public summary of his recent phone call with President-elect Trump, “no judgment” has been made about the veracity or sourcing or the memos. “Then there was Chuck Todd’s Wednesday interview with Ben Smith, the Editor of BuzzFeed, who published the memos on Tuesday. Todd repeatedly charged that the memos constituted ‘false information’ and ‘fake news’—without providing any explanation for why NBC, which has not reported that anything in the memos is either definitively false or definitively true, would leap ahead of its own reporting in this way. Nor did Todd explain how publishing material with repeated notices that it was ‘unverified,’ in a context in which that material was already in the hands of government officials and media operatives—and was, moreover, beginning to drive public policy and intelligence analysis nationally—would qualify as publishing something ‘fake.’”
Later in the week, Fox News declared that Trump had successfully “’stuck a knife in’ the dossier story by tweeting about it, of course and with, per usual (and here’s a correct use of the term) disinformation, as Trump falsely called Steele a ‘failed spy.’” Fox News, once again lied by omission, offering no correction of Trump’s mischaracterization of Steele and gave its readers no additional information about Steele’s career — “thereby letting the President-elect’s intemperate and dishonest tweet stand as its own proof.” Abrams adds Steele is now on the run for his life—fearing retribution, presumably, from Putin or Trump allies—so no one has spoken with him about his thinking on the memos or his motives in writing them.
Indeed, if anything we know three facts suggesting that Steele very much believes in the integrity of the information in the memos: (1) he continued trying to disseminate them to U.S. media and politicians even after he was not being paid to acquire new information, indeed even after the U.S. presidential election was over; (2) the BBC and other sources have confirmed that Steele is considered reliable by U.S. intelligence, one reason our nation relied upon his work in investigating corruption at FIFA; and (3) he and his family now fear for his life and are on the run, something we wouldn’t expect to see if Steele believed that everything in his memos was fanciful pap. Of course, we might also add, in addition to Steele’s decades-long history of trustworthiness and professionalism, that no one in the U.S. media has supplied for its American audience previous examples of meticulously detailed, 35-page intelligence memos written by an intelligence agent with a strong reputation and excellent sources that turned out to be—as Mitchell was suggesting of Steele’s work—entirely false and malevolently salacious.
Abramson says, “perhaps most concerning statement made in American media about the Steele memos was a statement made by Mitchell on-air on Thursday, which extended MSNBC’s entirely unsupported narrative discrediting the memos even further.” In his conclusion, Abramson states, “If America doesn’t investigate the validity of the information in the Steele memos in the next week (this week), that investigation may never occur.He says, “consequences of that failure to doggedly pursue the truth on our nation’s standing in the world—even on our allies’ ability and willingness to work with us to keep the world safe—could be devastating.”
There is much more to Abramson’s piece and you can read his full analysis and inquisition here in his Huffington Post piece. But please come back to share your thoughts and comments. And if you agree with him, pass his questions along to like-minds on your social media platforms, because media as we know it today, with it’s plethora of flaws, but also plethora of truths, may be coerced, intimidated, suppressed and controlled by a corrupt government in ways we never expected or imagined. And journalists and those work with news outlets will have to make decisions whether they’re willing to risk their jobs, their livelihood, and perhaps their safety — for the sake of truth. It’s a tough call especially if the safety of loved ones is also involved. If more take the courageous stand, we have a chance. If less, then Trump wins, and American loses.
Related:
Former CIA Agent For Moscow Supports Dossier: ‘This Is How Russians Operate’