Mike McIntire and Nicholas Confessore have put together an article which lays out how Donald Trump is picking up on slanderous attacks on Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman’s character and running with them. The article is attempting to show how Trump is handling impeachment.
While the White House has scrambled to mount an organized response to the House impeachment inquiry — there is no consistent message from Mr. Trump’s team and little formal guidance to surrogates — Twitter has become the Trump war room. The president and his supporters, including his family, have used Twitter to frame his defense, torch his Democratic inquisitors and try to undermine public officials, like Colonel Vindman, who have testified against him.
emphasis added
There’s no question this is an important story: the President of the United States is smearing a decorated serving military officer with unsubstantiated allegations in order to destroy the credibility of his testimony. It’s how they are handling all of the unfavorable news coming out. While the Times report does make an effort to characterize the claims with wording like “That accusation was unsubstantiated and has been rejected by some of the colonel’s colleagues.” there’s a problem.
After saying it’s unsubtantiated, the Times details it and similar accusations at some length. They are repeating and reinforcing the claims by doing so. The gist of them is that several people claim to have heard Vindman conversing with Russian military personnel during a NATO exercise 6 years ago, bashing America and touting Obama and globalism.
It’s not till the near the end of the article that this appears:
But those who know and have worked with him Vindman have provided a different account. They said that Colonel Vindman, then a military attaché, was assigned to meet with Russians and gather whatever intelligence he could.
He spoke to the Russians in Russian, did not denigrate the United States and reported everything he heard, according to a person briefed on the episode, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the colonel had not publicly testified. Colonel Vindman did not have dealings with Mr. Hickman in relation to his work during the exercise, the person said, and was not reprimanded for it.
And then there’s this just before the end:
In trying to undermine the impeachment inquiry, the president and his allies have repeatedly called witnesses “Never Trumpers,” spread rumors and conspiracy theories and described the process as a coup.
In more than 55 tweets over 47 days, The New York Times found, Mr. Trump claimed falsely that elements of the original whistle-blower’s account had fallen apart or proven incorrect. The president has also encouraged reporters to reveal the whistle-blower’s identity, without doing so himself.
In journalism, this is called “burying the lede” — putting the key elements of a story far down in an article. It can be deliberate, or it can be inadvertent. The effect is still the same — it lessens their impact and may even cause them to be overlooked if people don’t read past the opening paragraphs. This article would read quite differently if those two paragraphs had been the opening — the “lede”. Try it yourself — read the above two paragraphs and then go to the story to read the rest of it.
(The last two paragraphs are short, reporting how Don Jr. tweeted out a link to an article naming the Whistleblower. That can be considered witness intimidation, which is a crime. Imagine if that had been at the top.)
The problem for mainstream media covering the Trump presidency is the default reflex to treat statements coming from the White House as de facto legitimate, credible, and worthy of consideration. In a normal presidency, that would largely be reasonable. (There’s always some spin.) Reporting Trump’s baseless tweets and accusations has the effect of mainstreaming them — it’s how the toxic memes coming out of the wild get mainstreamed and become talking points, via Cokie’s Law.
In the Information Age, exposure is everything, especially as people pick and choose what they want to believe. If Trump and Don Jr. had not picked up on those original allegations, would they have gotten front page attention from the NY Times? Reporting on something like this without making it worse by doing so is a problem. While the Whistleblower who sparked the Ukraine investigation has been outed by several sources, including Don. Jr. mainstream news outlets have held off — so far. Right wing media haven’t; as Spocko points out, that is a crime.
See, it’s not just Trump — the GOP has been doing this for decades; it’s the business model of Fox News and right wing Talk Radio. The Swiftboating referred to in the title of this post refers to the campaign by which John Kerry’s war record as a wounded combat veteran was mocked to discredit him — and draw attention away from George W. Bush’s questionable military service. Also “her emails”, Behnghazi!!!, the attacks on Christine Blasey-Ford, all the way back to Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Donald Trump is apparently thrilled that Florida Republicans in one community have chosen to block access to the NY Times. But as long as the media gives space to his and all the other lies coming from the right, it still counts as a win.