Posted on 07/27/2017 9:01:58 AM PDT by Lorianne
Donald Trump, Jr. appears to be the latest figure in President Donald Trumps inner circle to be caught in the giant web of the Great Kremlin Conspiracy. Trump the younger said he was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, but that all he got in his June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer was an earful about dropping the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russian officials involved in the death of a Russian lawyer who was killed in detention.
If the Trump, Jr. meeting is just another chapter in the Beltway telenovela about Trump selling out America to the Russians through an ever-changing cast of supposed intermediariescome back, Mike Flynn and Carter Page, we hardly knew yeit sheds valuable light on the ways and means by which the news that fills our iPhone screens and Facebook feeds is now produced. You see, the Russian lawyeroften carelessly presented as a Russian government lawyer with close ties to PutinNatalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump, also worked recently with a Washington, D.C. commercial research and strategic intelligence firm that is also believed to have lobbied against the Magnitsky Act. That firm, which also doubles as an opposition research shop, is called Fusion GPSfamous for producing the Russia dossier distributed under the byline of Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent for hire.
Steeles report, a collection of anonymously-sourced allegations, many of which were said to come from high-ranking former Russian government officialsi.e. not exactly the kinds of people who seem likely to randomly shoot the shit with ex-British spooksdetailed Trumps ties to Russian officials and strange sexual obsessions. Originally ordered up by one of Trumps Republican challengers, the dossier circulated widely in D.C. in the months before the 2016 election, pushed by the Clinton campaign, but no credible press organization was able to verify its claims. After Clintons surprise loss, the dossier became public, and its claimswhile still unverifiedhave shaped the American public sphere ever since.
Yet at the same time that Fusion GPS was fueling a campaign warning against a vast Russia-Trump conspiracy to destroy the integrity of American elections, the company was also working with Russia to influence American policyby removing the same sanctions that Trump was supposedly going to remove as his quid pro quo for Putins help in defeating Hillary. Many observers, including the press, cant quite figure out how the firm wound up on both sides of the fence. Sen. Chuck Grassley wants to know if Fusion GPS has violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
As the founders of Fusion GPS surely understand, flexibility is a key recipe for successand the more room you can occupy in the news cycle, the bigger the brand. After all, theyre former journalistsand good ones. Fusion GPS is the story of a few journalists who decided to stop being suckers. Theyre not buyers of information, theyre sellers.
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Fusion GPS was founded in 2009before the social media wave destroyed most of the remaining structures of 20th-century American journalismby two Wall Street Journal reporters, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. They picked up former colleagues from the Journal, Tom Catan, and Neil King, Jr. , who were also well-respected by their peers. When the social media wave hit two years later, print medias last hopes for profitability vanished, and Facebook became the actual publisher of most of the news that Americans consumed. Opposition research and comms shops like Fusion GPS became the news-roomswith investigative teams and foreign bureausthat newspapers could no longer afford.
As top reporters themselves, the principals of Fusion GPS knew exactly what their former colleagues needed in order to package and sell stories to their editors and bosses. Simpson was one of the top terror-finance investigative reporters in the field, says one Washington-based journalist, who knows Simpson professionally and personally, and who asked for anonymity in discussing a former reporter. He got disillusioned when Rupert Murdoch took over the Journal because there was less room for the kind of long-form investigative journalism he thrived on.
And now, says the journalist, theyre guns for hire. They were hired to dig up dirt on donors to Mitt Romneys campaign , they were hired by Planned Parenthood after a video exposing some of the organizations controversial practices.
Besides Russia, Fusion GPS has also worked with other foreign countries, organizing campaigns and creating news that furthers the aims of the people who pay for their servicesusing the fractured playing field of news to extend old-fashioned lobbying efforts in a way that news consumers have been slow to understand.
Fusion GPS, according to the companys website, offers a cross-disciplinary approach with expertise in media, politics, regulation, national security, and global markets. What does that mean, exactly? They were hired by a sheikh in the UAE after he was toppled in a coup and waged an information war against his brother, one well-respected reporter who has had dealings with the company told me. I believe they seeded the New Yorker story about the Trump Hotel in Azerbaijan with alleged connections to the IRGC. They may have been hired to look into Carlos Slim. Its amazing how much copy they generate. Theyre really effective. (About the former example, New Yorker editor David Remnick said this was not true.)
Yet it is rare to read stories about comms shops like Fusion GPS because traditional news organizations are reluctant to bite the hands that feed them. But they are the news behind the newswell known to every D.C. beat reporter as the sources who set the table and provide the sources for their big scoops. The ongoing transformation of foundering, profitless news organizations into dueling proxies for partisan comms operatives is bad news for American readers, and for our democracy. But it is having a particularly outsized effect on reporting in the area of foreign policy, where expert opinion is prizedand easily boughtand most reporters and readers are only shallowly informed.
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For the past seven years, Ive reported on and written about American foreign policy and what I saw as troubling trends in how we describe and debate our relationship to the rest of the world. What Ive concluded during that period is that the fractious nature of those argumentsover the Iran Deal, for instance, or the war in Syria, or Russias growing role in the Middle East and elsewhereis a symptom of a problem here at home. The issue is not about this or that foreign policy. Rather, the problem is that the mediating institutions that enabled Americans to debate and decide our politics and policies, here and abroad, are deeply damaged, likely beyond repair.
The shape of the debate over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action illustrated this most clearly. The Obama White House turned the press into an instrument used not only to promote its initiatives, but also to drown out and threaten and shame critics and potential opponents, even within the presidents own party. Given the financial exigencies of a media whose business model had been broken by the internet, mismanagement, and the rise of social media as the dominant information platform, the prestige press sacrificed its independence for access to power. If for instance, your beat was national security, it was difficult at best to cross the very few sources of power in Washington that controlled access to information. Your job depended on it. And there are increasingly fewer jobs in the press.
Ironically, the seeds of the moral and physical collapse of the American press were planted at the moment of its greatest popular triumphAll the Presidents Men. Not the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, but the 1976 film lionizing the work of journalists whose big story about the Watergate break-in and cover-up was based on information provided by a government official, who steered their reporting until he brought down the President of the United States. Oh sure, have it your way, Mark Feltaka Deep Throatwas a whistleblower, a man of conscience serving the people he protected for decades as a federal agent. But he was also a man who wanted to become Director of the FBI, and became furious at Nixon for snubbing him for the top job. In other words, the hero of this epic tale was an embittered law enforcement official who instead of going public with what he knew about a crime, manipulated a vital American institution, the free press, to pay back his boss, while the reporters manfully withheld that information from their readers.
This is to take nothing away from the sedulous and detailed reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But the lesson of Watergate has been imprinted on two generations of journalists, and it was only a matter of time before it was raised to the level of a virtue in the Obama yearsif you want to break real news, you need to ingratiate yourself with the mid to high-level officials who are in position to leak it to you. And then, the bottom fell out of the news business.
Try to imagine what its like for recent graduates from the countrys top journalism schools when they first hit the Washington happy hour scene. Its their first time out with their senior colleagues, their mentorswhoever still has a job. Everyone is three drinks into the evening and bragging about whos closer to some deputy assistant secretary at the Pentagon, or the scheduler for the vice presidents chief of staff.
Gee, the apprentice reporter thinks to herself, in my Sociology of the Fourth Estate seminar at Medill, my favorite professor told me that as journalists, those who help provide the free flow of information necessary for the electorate to make choices about how we live at home and influence others abroad, we serve the American people. And now youre saying that what were really doing is advancing the interests of certain bureaucrats against their rivals in other bureaucracies. So were political operativesexcept we get paid less. Much much less.
SNIP
The dirt diggers/propagandists usually try to stay off the radar.
This will be very interesting.
Like the “fake news” meme, this is boomeranging on the Left and smacking them right in the face.
You could argue that the Fusion GPS dossier is the origin of “fake news”, it is “book one”. A label that backfired on the liberal press so bad it will resonate for decades.
“Fusion GPS Illuminates the Brave New World of Manufactured News for Hire”
nothing new about this at all; just “journalists” ignorant of history.
if one reads “Hamiliton” one sees that pretty much ALL political “news” of that era in the colonies (and then the U.S.) was manufactured and much of it was done by hire.
Thanks for posting this excellent article. BTTT.
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