IMAGE: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a personal send-off for members of the Russian Olympic team at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, July 27, 2016. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
IMAGE: Russian President Vladimir Putin (C), Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (L) and Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Alexander Bortnikov watch events to mark Victory Day in Sevastopol May 9, 2014. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo
Now that the horses have left the barn, trotted out the front gate, and are galloping headlong down the county road, editors at the New York Times have taken to public bickering about who left the stalls unlatched.
Not that it’s doing the rest of us much good.
How the Times retains its pre-eminent place in American journalism after decades of politicized bungling at the highest levels continues to mystify. Almost regardless of how many fruitless “investigations” it flogs or catastrophic wars the newspaper enables, its editors invariable response to criticism remains “We’re the New York Times, and you’re not.”
Even when, as in the latest public challenge to the Times’s high opinion of itself comes from inside the building. Public editor Liz Spayd wrote a recent column arguing that regarding Donald Trump’s strange “bromance” with Vladimir Putin, the newspaper definitely left the stall doors ajar.
Headlined “Trump, Russia, and the News Story That Wasn’t,” Spayd’s column argues that despite having plenty of potentially explosive information about an ongoing FBI probe into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russian intelligence operatives, the newspaper sat on the story.
“Conversations over what to publish were prolonged and lively” she writes “involving Washington and New York, and often including the executive editor, Dean Baquet. If the allegations were true, it was a huge story. If false, they could damage The Times’s reputation. With doubts about the material and with the F.B.I. discouraging publication, editors decided to hold their fire.”
Spayd believes the Times was too timid by half. “If you know the F.B.I. is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write.”
It may also be worthwhile recalling, although Spayd somewhat downplays the comparison, how the newspaper handled an investigation of Trump’s rival. The Times treated FBI Director James Comey’s highly irregular October 28 letter re-opening the agency’s fruitless probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails like the Pearl Harbor attack. There was hardly anything else on the front page.
Then on October 31, the Times delivered itself of a front-page exclusive headlined “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Anonymous “law enforcement officials” said so. Russian hacking of Democratic emails, the article concluded “was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.”
Since the election, the Times has reversed itself: “Both intelligence and law enforcement officials agree that there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Russian hacking was primarily aimed at helping Mr. Trump and damaging his opponent.”
Too late. Before the November 8 contest most of the national media followed the Times’ lead in soft-pedaling the Moscow connection. Regardless of its blunders, the newspaper’s influence remains canonical. Reporters want to work there pretty much the way whiz kids want to go to Harvard.
Meanwhile, as CNBC reported, none other than “FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election.”
Oh no, perish the thought.
Just the other day, President Trump actually blew Comey a kiss at a White House reception. He’s so impulsive and unpredictable, our president.
Comey gets to keep the job.
But back to the internal dispute at the New York Times. Liz Spayd’s column about editorial foot-dragging so annoyed Executive Editor Dean Baquet that he took to the rival Washington Post to characterize it as “a bad column,” with a “ridiculous conclusion.”
Writing to the always provocative Erik Wemple blog, Baquet denies that the Times got played by its sources. “We did not have a story. It was unpublishable speculation,” he writes. “It made no difference what the Feds wanted. She doesn’t understand what happened. We reported the hell out of this, as did other news organizations, and we could prove nothing….When a news organization concludes that it cannot prove something, it doesn’t get to say, ‘I want to show you my notebook anyway.’”
Point taken. Not that it’s ever kept the Times from publishing speculative “scandal” stories over the past quarter century or so. Although Spayd’s too politic to say so, it appears that she could also be speaking on behalf of Times reporters whose stories got spiked. Either way, we’ve likely not heard the last of this intramural conflict.
Of course, the most effective response to an accusation of editorial cowardice is a demonstration of editorial courage. The incoming Trump administration will give surely Baquet and everybody else plenty of chances. As the Times has since reported, Trump took office amid an ongoing counterintelligence probe of numerous associates. Short of a high-level Russian defector, however, it’s hard to imagine Americans will ever know the complete truth.
To catch a runaway horse, it’s helpful to carry a bucket of feed. Chasing them, however, is futile; you’ve got to let the animals come to you.
IMAGE: Donald Trump greets supporters during his election night rally in Manhattan. REUTERS/Mike Segar
Here’s a thought exercise: What do you suppose would happen if Russian strongman Vladimir Putin decided to clarify remarks he reportedly made about Donald Trump during the election campaign?
“I never said Trump was ‘brilliant,’” he might say. “That was a poor translation. I said he was ‘colorful,’ which nobody denies. Unfortunately, he is also an ignorant buffoon with no greater understanding of international relations than the average Moscow prostitute, of which he has known many.”
Would Trump confine himself to mocking Putin’s short stature and bare-chested TV appearances on his Twitter account? Or would the United States and Russia go to war footing overnight?
Fortunately, we can all relax. Everybody understands that Trump lives so deep in Putin’s pocket that no such exchange seems possible. When it comes to foreign affairs, the only constant in our new president’s pronouncements is that he has never yet said anything—not one single thing–that the Russian dictator would find objectionable.
It’s really remarkable. On everything from the invasion of Crimea to the obsolescence of NATO and the breakup of the European Union, Trump’s remarks may as well have been crafted in the Kremlin. Trump’s Secretary of State designee had a medal pinned on his chest by Putin himself; his national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn had a paid gig on the Russia Today TV network, and has dined publicly with the Russian leader.
Weakening NATO, the military alliance that has brought stability and prosperity to the West since 1945, is the number one priority of Putin’s foreign policy, exposing Eastern Europe to the tender mercies of the Russian army. One needn’t yearn for a new Cold War to realize what a terrible thing that would be.
As for the European Union, here are some relevant numbers: In 2016, total U.S. trade with the EU was roughly $650 billion. It’s our most important economic partnership by far. Total trade with Russia totaled $20 billion.
Economically speaking, the EU is more than thirty times more valuable to the United States than Russia. Any questions? Russia occupies a vast landmass and has a formidable military, but its economy is smaller than Italy’s.
The Russians are a great, long-suffering people; we couldn’t have won World War II without them. But does anybody want to buy Russian cars, computers, or TVs? No, they do not.
The last thing the world needs is Russia looming over once captive nations such as Poland and Lithuania like a bear at a picnic table. A Democrat who proposed such things would be accused of treason.
So anyway, here’s what it’s come to: In the course of defending Trump from scurrilous accusations in Buzzfeed, Putin also praised the beauty and skill of Moscow prostitutes, who he proclaimed “the best in the world.”
Back in 2013 when the president-elect visited Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, Putin alibied, “He wasn’t a politician, we didn’t even know about his political ambitions. Do they think that our special services are hunting for every U.S. billionaire?”
Actually, Vladimir, yes they do. Even Trump knows that. During his recent press conference, he said he warned friends to behave themselves, “Because you don’t want to see yourself on television. Cameras all over the place.”
In Moscow, they even have a word for it, “kompromat”—a combination of the Russian words for “compromising” and “information.” Luring public figures into proverbial “honey traps” or manufacturing scandal against troublesome individuals is a common practice of authoritarian regimes everywhere—but nowhere more than in Russia.
It’s well known that Putin got his big break in politics when, as a young intelligence officer, he affirmed that a murky videotape of a man cavorting with hookers was indeed a foe of Boris Yeltsin’s. Today, sleazy videos of public figures are a regular feature on Russian TV. The sheer coarseness of political dialogue can be hard to believe.
I got a small taste of it last summer after unmasking a pair of Russian trolls that I called “Boris” and “Natasha” after the cartoon characters: all scatology, sexual insults, and veiled threats clearly based upon Internet misinformation. Some foreign journalists have had kiddie porn installed on their computers by such unknown parties.
That said, apart from one lurid detail I won’t repeat, none of the naughty bits in the dodgy Trump dossier struck me as shocking. Trump has long boasted to radio shock jock Howard Stern and others about barging into beauty contestants’ dressing rooms, copping feels, etc. He’s also on record about the supposedly loose morals of Russian women.
Yet whatever Putin has on Trump, I doubt it’s sexual—everybody’s favorite distraction. The real purpose of kompromat isn’t necessarily blackmail, but the promotion of discord, cynicism, and widespread disbelief in such “liberal” values as the distinction between truth and make-believe.
And when people come to assume that everybody’s crooked and nobody can be believed, the strongman always wins.
IMAGE: Flickr/DonkeyHotey
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