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The Problem Bezos Can’t See

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The whimpering op-ed by WaPo owner Jeff Bezos, which Marcy shredded here, starts with a true statement: trust in the media is lower than trust in Congress and has been falling steadily since 1972, according to this from Gallup. Here’s the question Gallup asks:

In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?

How would any thinking person answer that question? Do I average across all the media I consume or all the media I hear about? Do I average across all the reporters I read or all reporters? Do I allow for size of audience? Does it matter if I’m talking science or SCOTUS rulings or political campaigns? Are we talking about the language of the reporters, the headlines, the way they handle anonymity or something else? I know some of them are deliberately lying. How do I factor that in? I don’t know what this question is measuring, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t very useful for the purposes Bezos uses it.

The interesting fact shows up in the tabs. The huge change comes from Republicans, where the total of “great deal” and “fair amount” went from 68 in 1972 to 12 in 2024; and Independents, from 60 to 27. The drop in Democrats is far less, from 74 to 54, and most of that is in the last two years.

I’d guess that no one distrusts the media they follow. If the question to Republicans was “do you trust Fox News”, the answer would be either “a great deal” or “a fair amount”.

I don’t “trust” the media. I have more confidence in some than others, and I start with an inclination to trust reporting in those. Trust comes from checking the sources cited, documents linked, and the input of other people whose opinions I’ve come to value. Like Marcy.

The actual problem

Ever since early 2016, Democrats in the general population have been complaining about the tilt of major media against Democrats and in favor of Trump and his cronies. Even before that, activists were pointing out that the Sunday shows feature Republicans, and rarely Democrats. It was a running joke that eiher John McCain or Lindsay Graham or both were on every Sunday. The complaints became angry as the media swarmed over the ridiculous Her Emails and Coney Says pieces, because most of us think that coverage made the difference in Hillary Clinton’s loss.

The complaints grew louder after Trump took office and reached a crescendo after the 2020 election when the idiot media failed to recognize that Trump was planning a coup. Tben the media told us that the second impeachment would never succeed, even before it was initiated, and treated it as a game. The facts didn’t matter, and they didn’t care.

Then Biden took office, and instead of attacking Trump as a proven danger, the media treated him as a candidate in waiting. They failed to report the utter failure of Trump’s policies. Tax cuts for the rich raised the national debt without creating any value for the nation. Appointing a SCOTUS so corrupt it would throw out any precedent Republicans don’t like had horrendous consequences for millions an no gain to anyone. Roe ve Wade is replaced by a reign of terror in Red States? Not news. Student loan forgiveness thrown out on spurious grounds? Perfectly normal, and forgotten immediately.

They treated the effective team of Biden and the Democrats as equivalent to the obstructionist Trump and his lickspittle Republicans. They refused to report the successes of the Biden Administration on the economy and on the lives of us normal people. Instead they spewed a steady stream of lies and distractions pumped out by Trump and his billionaire backers.

The media assaulted Biden over his age, but refused to apply the same standard to Trump’s degenerating brain. Instead we got constant sane-washing of Trump’s weird rants. We only knew about them because of assiduous clipping and posting to social media and the amplification given by those not-journalists Bezos derides.

The spiked endorsement was just too much. People exploded.

And Bezos thinks this problem is affected by endorsements? His newspaper treats fantastical Republican talking points as equivalent to reality for years, and he condescends to explain that he has principles so we should suck it up and give him more money? He can’t figure out why his most likely readers and those with the highest trust in media, are furious?

Admit it Jeff: you’re afraid of Trump, and you kissed his ring.

Jeff Bezos’ Manifesto of Impotence

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The second richest man in the world believed he could reverse the damage he already did by writing an op-ed.

That was his first mistake.

Jeff Bezos starts his column by pointing to the decline in trust in journalism. Seemingly including himself, the second richest oligarch in the world, in the profession of journalism, Bezos complains, “Our profession is now the least trusted of all.”

Bezos then deigns to explain (it’s not clear whether he believes he’s writing for disgruntled subscribers or his employees who actually are in the profession of journalism) via analogy: Newspapers, like voting machines, must not only be accurate but must be perceived as accurate.

Bezos then attempts to defend this analogy, but in the process, asserts — without presenting any evidence — that perceived bias is the reason “most people” distrust the media.

Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

There’s so much logical collapse that gets papered over in this pablum. Which parts of “most people” believe the media is biased? More importantly, do they believe in or value “reality”? Because if many of them don’t — spoiler alert! the people squawking most loudly about media bias do not believe in empirical reality — then you’ve wildly misdiagnosed the problem. Those people won’t decide whether to trust voting machines based on anything the vendors do — just ask Dominion about that! They’ll decide whether to trust voting machines based on faith. And no amount of pandering will change that until you change the foundation on which their faith in propaganda is built.

Reality is in fact on the ballot this year, the race remains neck and neck, and you, Jeff Bezos, decided to go down without a fight.

Having declared that, “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility,” Bezos does a number of things to piss away his own credibility:

  • He attributes his last minute decision to spike presidential endorsements and only presidential endorsements to “inadequate planning.”
  • He naively disavows any quid pro quo because his Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp “didn’t know about” the meeting Trump would schedule immediately after Bezos spiked the Kamala Harris endorsement “in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning,” as if Bezos and his executives are helpless in the face of Trump’s manipulation.
  • He admits that, “Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials,” but doesn’t consider whether that’s a credibility issue more pressing than presidential endorsements.
  • Rather than doing something to address those credibility risks, Bezos instead asks his still undefined reader to just trust him. “I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled.”
  • Bezos again conflates lack of credibility with a market for views that pointedly don’t aspire to reality. “Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. … Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources.” Even as a business proposition, Bezos is unaware of what product he is selling, of what product competitors eating into his market share are selling.
  • Denying, again, any motivation of personal self-interest, Bezos then asserts — the same week his own boneheaded decision (if you believe reality) or failure of adequate planning (if you believe Bezos’ excuse) led to 200,000 subscribers fleeing the paper — that “allow[ing] this paper to stay on autopilot” is what will lead it to “fade into irrelevance.”

Dude: You just did something that made both the paper itself irrelevant (by spiking the work of its leaders) which then led longterm supporters to flee. You did that. It’s not autopilot that is making the WaPo irrelevant. It’s Bezos-pilot. It is your misdiagnosis of the problem and boneheaded decisions based on that misdiagnosis.

That’s why it irks me that Bezos doesn’t adhere to basic standards of disclosure. He is tagged on his byline as nothing more than, “the owner of the Washington Post.” And while he admits in his column that he owns the company whose CEO naively took a last minute meeting after Bezos spiked the Harris endorsement, and admits that there is some uncatalogued group of “other philanthropies and companies” that leads him and his executives to “meet[] with government officials” on a daily basis, he does not disclose what they are in his bio.

He doesn’t reveal that if Trump wins he’ll get massive tax cuts that will let him further accumulate wealth. He doesn’t describe that he owns a massive network of warehouses whose labor fights will be decidedly more contentious under a Harris Administration. He doesn’t mention the cloud contracts that led to a sustained conflict with the cronyist Trump Administration.

Now you may believe that none of those things would influence the boneheaded decision Bezos made or the way he implemented it. But he’s not going to address them — like a voting machine operator would — by laying out those possible conflicts according to the standards of journalism.

Nope. Instead, Bezos is going to claim he’s nothing more than a humble little newspaper owner. He’s just going to ask you to trust him at his word. “I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled.”

It’s that pablum paragraph, unworthy of a college freshman, that’s the real tell, though. “Reality is an undefeated champion!!” “Those who fight reality lose!!”

The fight against fascism is substantially a fight to defend reality over propaganda. The reason to make an endorsement, this year, is precisely to defend a reality that needs a vigorous champion, not to capitulate to the Substackers offering listeners what their faith in a strongman leads them to want to hear.

Ah well. Instead of joining that fight, the second richest man in the world confessed, right there in print, that he believes reality will win without a fight.

Update: I added the line about faith in voting machines after I first published.

The Media Started Capitulating to Trump with Russia Russia Russia

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I took a few days to go wander around Paris.

In the meantime (as Nicole and I discussed on Friday), the WaPo has subjugated itself to Donald Trump by spiking an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Whatever else WaPo and LAT’s capitulation to Trump has done, it has focused attention on media failures this year.

I concluded back in February that the media was not going to help hold Trump accountable this year. I concluded that when zero traditional outlets pursued the story of how Donald Trump’s DOJ used a side channel to ingest dirt Rudy Giuliani collected from — among others — known Russian spies to criminally frame Joe Biden, with the Alexander Smirnov bribery allegation.

One candidate’s DOJ criminally framed the other candidate and it has been simply ignored.

That’s not the only way the media has failed. Hell, there have been maybe two stories about Trump’s abuse of pardons. There has been no scrutiny about whether Trump works for the Saudis, rather than the American people. We don’t talk about the fact that Trump stole 100 classified documents, and probably more we haven’t located.

This failure is not surprising. After all, the first act via which Trump cowed the media came with his success at spinning the results of the Russian investigation.

The Mueller investigation and its aftermath obtained legal judgments that Trump’s Coffee Boy, his National Security Adviser, his campaign manager, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover-up what happened with Russia in 2016. That’s an astoundingly productive investigation, one that should keep the issue of what really did happen at the forefront (particularly after Treasury confirmed that Russian spooks did get the internal campaign information Paul Manafort shared). And yet the media has never taken the time to fact check Trump’s Russia Russia Russia chant, via which he dismisses the result of the Russian investigation as a witch hunt. The media never calls him on that lie.

For whatever reason — perhaps ignorance, perhaps exhaustion — the media has allowed Trump to dodge accountability for the help Russia gave him in 2016. They have allowed him to apply a double standard on the Iran and Chinese hacks this year, when Trump invited foreign hacks in 2016. They simply ignored how in advance of 2020, Rudy Giuliani flew around the world soliciting help from — again, this is uncontroversial — at least one known Russian spy, right out in the open.

This is one thing I’ve tried to accomplish with the Ball of Thread series. Here’s how it worked.

  • Trump and the media let the Steele dossier serve as a substitute for the actual things Trump did, both before and after the election.
  • Trump turned an investigation into people grifting off their access to him into an attack on him by the Deep State.
  • Republicans in Congress picked up and expanded the Steele dossier substitution.
  • Along the way, these efforts did real, undoubtedly intentional damage to the FBI, especially those with expertise on Russia.
  • Bill Barr thwarted what was intended as an impeachment referral.
  • In his effort to kill Zombie Mueller, Barr created propaganda about the investigation and Joe Biden and laid the groundwork for January 6.
  • The Durham investigation criminalized Hillary’s victimization by Russia.
  • Bill Barr helped Rudy criminally frame Joe Biden.
  • The Hunter Biden investigation(s) sucked up all the oxygen that should have been focused on Trump.

This is the process by which Trump has stoked grievance out of a Russian investigation that concluded that five top aides lied to hide what really happened.

And the media, to this day, lets him dismiss all that by chanting only Russia Russia Russia.

The media’s surrender, led by Jeff Bezos, to Trump’s authoritarianism is not new. The media has been doing this for six years.

The More Puzzling Inaction in SDNY: National Enquirer

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As bmaz noted, SDNY released less redacted copies of warrants to search Michael Cohen’s property today, revealing many more details about Cohen’s negotiation of hush payments for Trump.

A lot of people are trying to figuring out how Trump and Hope Hicks avoided charges — the former for his very active involvement in campaign finance crimes, the latter for lying to the FBI. But an equally important question, I think, pertains to American Media Inc. AMI is a likely mention behind the first redaction in the redacted footnote where the government describes the disposition of the investigation.

After all, DOJ publicly announced in December that AMI — the parent company of the National Enquirer — had entered into a Non-Prosecution Agreement with DOJ in September 2018. And they were involved in both campaign finance crimes, the hush payments to both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels. So they should be mentioned in precisely that spot.

But that raises questions about why the mention should be redacted. While the AMI NPA is not readily available from a search on the main DOJ website (I believe it used to be), it still remains linked on SDNY’s site. It’s public.

And, frankly, the closure of this investigation is just as suspicious with respect to AMI as it is with Trump and Hicks. That’s because Jeff Bezos published records in February showing AMI threatening to publish details that would embarrass him that raised real questions about whether AMI was in violation of its NPA.

Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is “apoplectic” about our investigation. For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.

A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn’t stop our investigation.

My lawyers argued that AMI has no right to publish photos since any person holds the copyright to their own photos, and since the photos in themselves don’t add anything newsworthy.

There were public reports at the time that SDNY was weighing whether these threats constituted a violation of AMI’s NPA. Those reports were all the more interesting as the National Enquirer exposure of Bezos’ affair seemed like a favor to Trump, who has long targeted Bezos.

If that references is to AMI, then it shouldn’t be redacted, as the fact of the NPA is public, even on SDNY’s own website. But if the entire investigation — including into AMI’s possible follow-up violations of its DPA — it would suggest DOJ was going easy on not just Trump and Hicks, but also Trump’s favorite rag.

Open Thread: Is that a Smile? [UPDATE]

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[FYI, update is at the bottom of this post./~Rayne]

I’m putting up an open thread since the BDTS thread is filling up as the Oversight Committee’s hearing continues.

There have been some developments in the case of National Enquirer owner AMI’s extortive letter to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, threatening to leak sext images exchanged with his paramour.

If you haven’t read Bezos’ open letter to AMI you really should. There’s something about AMI’s attempt that’s more than squicky; it smells sloppy and desperate.

Perhaps it merely reflects what Bezos says about AMI’s David Pecker — that Pecker was “apoplectic” about Bezos’ attempt to investigate the source of personal text messages leaked by AMI outlet National Enquirer.

Or perhaps it reflects some urgency related to the level of interest from other parties.

In any case, there were a number of discussions in Twitter last night as to whether AMI’s letter met the legal definition of extortion. Former fed prosecutor Renato Mariotti published a thread on the topic and former fed prosecutor Mimi Rocah also had questions about the letter.

Bloomberg reported today that the feds in SDNY are now looking into National Enquirer’s treatment of Bezos’ affair and whether it violates the agreement AMI entered into regarding the Michael Cohen “Catch and Kill” hush money case. The agreement prohibited further illegal activity.

What was it about Bezos’ private investigations that set off David Pecker so badly he’d not think about the implications to AMI’s agreements?

Bezos appears confident — though he hasn’t confirmed this in public — that the messages he exchanged with his married lover were entirely private. This suggests that their leakage was through illegal means.

Why would Pecker risk the possibility such an extortive act might expose illegal surveillance methods had been used against Bezos?

The one other recent case where Pecker’s name has come up in regard to aggressive surveillance and shaping news media coverage was that of Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Pecker and Weinstein have been characterized as friends:

Mr. Weinstein held off press scrutiny with a mix of threats and enticements, drawing reporters close with the lure of access to stars, directors and celebrity-packed parties. Some journalists negotiated book and movie deals with him even as they were assigned to cover him. The studio chief once paid a gossip writer to collect juicy celebrity tidbits that Mr. Weinstein could use to barter if other reporters stumbled onto an affair he was trying to keep quiet. He was so close to David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The Enquirer, that he was known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable “F.O.P.,” or “friend of Pecker.” That status was shared by a chosen few, including President Trump.

(source: Weinstein’s Complicity Machine, 05-DEC-2017)

Weinstein had hired Black Cube to bat clean up on stories about his sexually abusive behavior. Who referred this private investigation firm to Weinstein?

It’s also possible the effort to silence Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post (owned by Bezos through holding company Nash Holdings) was driven not by Pecker’s relationship with Donald Trump but by Pecker’s desire to do business in Saudi Arabia. What resources would have been used to obtain Bezos’ text messages if Pecker was already tied up with KSA?

Saudi Arabia has now responded by denying any involvement in the conflict between Bezos and AMI, minimizing the dispute as a “soap opera.”

Again, treat this as an open thread.
_______

UPDATE — 4:15 P.M. ET —

Activist Iyad El-Baghdadi has just finished a thread looking at the Bezos-AMI dispute. He had already pointed out each allusion to Saudi Arabia in Bezos’ letter; in his Twitter thread he says a Saudi whistleblower told him Crown Prince MBS is obsessed with the Washington Post and targeting WaPo journalists.

But the bit that clicked for me with regard to David Pecker: with its extortive letter attempting to blackmail performance from Bezos, if AMI was acting on behalf of or in coordination with a foreign nation-state, they may be in violation of Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Now one needs to ask themselves, assuming AMI did this for MBS/KSA, was this the first time they acted on behalf of another nation-state? Or have they acted as agents for foreign powers before and it’s all in their vaults?

Where’s that popcorn?

Jerome Corsi’s Gazillion Dollar Lawsuit Against the Same Media Targets that Individual-1 Is Targeting

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Jerome Corsi’s already frivolous lawsuit against Robert Mueller yesterday got still more sanction-worthy. On top of adding new defendants (including Jeff Bezos), he and his crack lawyer Larry Klayman asked for damages of [takes off glasses and peers closely] $1.35 trillion billions, of which $800 million million would come from Bezos, which — these fabulists claim — would be just 5% of his $140 billion net worth and not, instead, more than the richest man in the world is worth.

Admittedly, by the end of the day they had fixed these errors, now asking for an utterly modest $1.35 billion in punitive damages.

But I’m interested in what the amended complaint says about Corsi’s stunt.

Corsi justifies adding Bezos based off what is either an Infowars fabrication or an attempt to pre-empt a WaPo story that Mueller believes InfoWars paid Jerome Corsi $15,000 a month to keep him quiet.

In an email sent yesterday to lawyer Marc Randazza, the Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman states, “I’ve been able to confirm that Robert Mueller’s investigators have been asking witnesses about the financial relationship between Infowars and Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone’s role in helping Corsi get his Infowars job.”

Asking why Infowars hired Corsi, Helderman states, “Mueller seems to be exploring that the job was hush money in some way.”

Corsi was hired by Infowars in January 2017 to set up a Washington bureau. His contract renewed in January 2018 but then the relationship was ended in June 2018. Corsi was paid routine 6 months severance pay.

Corsi was hired at a time when the Roger Stone-Corsi conspiracy theory nexus tied to Wikileaks was not even being circulated. Corsi was fired because of his failure to adequately establish a Washington bureau, his failure to maintain White House press credentials, and his generally poor work performance.

Recall that Mueller also seems to be investigating whether Stone sent Randy Credico work in a bid to get him to sustain Stone’s claim he was the go-between with WikiLeaks. And Stone has said some of his campaign finance expenses were about throwing people who needed money some work.

In yesterday’s complaint, Corsi names not Helderman, but Manuel Roig-Franzia, along with Bezos.

Defendant Franzia is an individual, a reporter of WaPo working under and at the direction of Defendant Bezos and is on information and belief a citizen of Washington D.C.

Corsi names Franzia (who has done extensive interviews with Stone) because he’s the one who called Corsi about the allegations. Corsi claims that the day after Franzia called, Alex Jones’ daddy stopped paying him $15,000 a month.

Furthermore, on January 17, 2019, Defendant Franzia on behalf of Defendant WaPo telephoned Plaintiff Corsi to question him about information that Defendant WaPo had obtained from unspecified sources in the Office of the Special Counsel that Defendant Mueller was investigating monthly payments, which were characterized falsely and maliciously published as hush payments to Dr. Corsi so he would not provide “incriminating evidence,” about Alex Jones, InfoWars and Roger Stone before Defendant Mueller and the grand jury. These hush money payments to Plaintiff Corsi were maliciously and falsely represented to be made by Dr. David Jones, father of Alex Jones of InfoWars.

Defendant Franzia grilled Plaintiff Corsi about details of his relationship with InfoWars, David Jones, and Alex Jones. He indicated that his sources in the Office of the Special Counsel, and working under Defendant Mueller’s direction, told him Dr. David Jones was paying Dr. Corsi to influence and/or suppress and/or misrepresent and falsify his testimony to Defendant Mueller’s prosecutors and/or the FBI regarding Alex Jones and/or Roger Stone, as well as other government authorities.

Defendant Franzia told Plaintiff Corsi that Defendant WaPo that he had learned from the Special Counsel that Dr. Corsi was still today being paid $15,000/month by Dr. Jones.

As a direct result of Defendant Franzia and Defendant WaPo’s actions, directed by Defendant Bezos and carried out by Defendant Franzia and WaPo, working in concert with Defendant Mueller and the other Defendants, the very next day Plaintiff Corsi learned from Dr. David Jones that he was being terminated and would no longer be receiving $15,000 per month.

So rather than being cut off because Corsi testified against Roger Stone, he was cut off (in this fabulous complaint) because the WaPo is going to write that up.

While Infowars claims the hush money timing doesn’t make sense — because the payments started well before Corsi was subpoenaed — they actually time up to when Corsi may have deleted his pre-October 11, 2016 emails and when SSCI announced an investigation in January 2017. And Corsi seems to agree that his six months of severance got cut off (which he calls “terminatied”) sometime in the last month, in the wake of his revelations about his grand jury testimony.

Even as this is happening, Corsi is both trying to reassure Stone that prosecutors told him they would not be able to use his testimony that his August 2016 memo targeting the Podestas was a cover story.

And trying to back the Infowars/Stone claim that he was getting paid $15,000 a month not to work as part of a severance agreement.

And from this intra-rat-fucking fuckery, Corsi manufactures a $800,000,000,000,000 claim for punitive damages out of Bezos. And he does this, remarkably, even while claiming that Bezos’ company, Amazon, is a victim of the relentless Robert Mueller, because Amazon got a subpoena for a copy of the hard cover copy of Corsi’s book (which must differ from the online version that is already out).

Defendants have also threatened threatened Amazon.com, a distributor of Plaintiff Corsi’s new book, “Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s ‘Witch Hunt,’” published by Post Hill Press, with a subpoena to obtain a pre-publication copy of the hardback in-print version of the book when Defendant Mueller and the FBI federal could very easily obtain an already in print copy of the ebook and/or audiobook version of the same book on the internet. [my emphasis]

So Bezos is both villain and victim in Corsi’s fevered imagination. But being a victim won’t get him off the hook for $800,000,000,000,000 in damages.

I find the targeting of Bezos, coming in the same week that National Enquirer did a hit job on his affair, curious timing.

I also find one other detail of this amended complaint worthy of notice.

A big part of Corsi’s lawsuit is premised on the nonsense claim that Mueller leaks.

One of the paragraphs that got amended (the Ali Dukakis reference was always there) now works in a detail about last week’s BuzzFeed story, using the BuzzFeed story to substantiate Corsi’s claim Mueller leaked about him.

For instance, and as just one example, an article published by ABC News titled “Conspiracy Theorist Becomes Key Figure as Mueller Builds Case” contains confidential information regarding the grand jury proceedings about Plaintiff Corsi that could only possibly have come from Defendant Mueller.3 Consistent with the leaks concerning Plaintiff Corsi, it was recently revealed that a major leak concerning President Donald J. Trump was made by Defendant Mueller to BuzzFeed, namely that the president had ordered his private legal counsel Michael Cohen to lie to congressional committees over the Trump organization’s business dealings with Russia. After calls for a U.S. Justice Department investigation of this leak in particular – notwithstanding that the undersigned counsel had already filed complaints on behalf of Plaintiff Corsi and others concerning the Special Counsel’s continuing and harmful criminal grand jury leaks among other allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and illegality – Defendant Mueller, to try to cover his illegal tracks and head off a Department investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General — falsely repudiated what BuzzFeed had reported were indeed leaks from the Special Counsel.

That is, along with all the other shit in this complaint, Corsi is now suggesting that BuzzFeed’s story (which public evidence suggests likely came from SDNY sources) is proof that Mueller leaks because for the first time ever Peter Carr issued a correction probably in part to make it clear that Mueller wasn’t the source for the story.

And, curiously, Corsi makes that claim based on the representation that everyone was calling for a leak investigation on Friday. As far as I know, such calls really began when Rudy mentioned it on a Sunday show, which Ben Smith then pointed back to in his Reliable Sources appearance later that day.

Don’t get me wrong. I have zero doubt there will be a leak investigation into this story. But Corsi seems to have more knowledge of that than other people. Which I find curious, for a guy complaining about leaks.

Look, I don’t expect anyone to make sense out of this gazillion dollar lawsuit. It was never a serious lawsuit — not even when it made unsupported claims about NSA surveillance and media leaks. But yesterday it became far more of a messaging vehicle, a messaging vehicle targeting the same targets that the President is targeting.

This may be all this pack of rat-fuckers has left. But the specific form of their conspiracies deserves some notice.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

According to PropOrNot’s Conspiratorial Criteria, WaPo Is a US Intelligence Outlet

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I hope to have more to say about the whackjob story the WaPo peddled over the weekend about the shady “PropOrNot” effort to identify and blacklist Russian influenced media outlets, which according to the anonymous people behind it include Naked Capitalism, TruthDig, Consortium News, and Truthout. In the meantime, I’ve put some resources below (and am working on a page curating links about all the claimed Russian plots this year, credible and no).

But I wanted to look at how WaPo itself stacks up according to one of the criteria laid out in WaPo’s “news” piece on propaganda.

Here’s how the WaPo’s propaganda hunters identify propaganda outlets directed by the Russian state:

The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity. [my emphasis]

One of the clues, these researchers say, is to ID common ownership between known state entities and other media outlets.

That got printed in the Washington Post, a media outlet owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos is an oligarch currently worth around $62 billion dollars, largely through his ownership of almost 17% of Amazon’s stock.

And Amazon is a US government contractor, providing cloud services to the Intelligence Community.

In other words, WaPo and the Intelligence Community’s cloud contractor share a common owner, one of the world’s richest oligarchs, the kind of link that if Bezos were a well-connected Russian oligarch would easily mark the news outlet as propaganda.

I’m not making that argument. Thus far, at least, WaPo’s editorial focus doesn’t seem to have changed in the Bezos era (aside from decisions about coverage of DC areas news). It’d be hard to distinguish an IC-directed editorial slant from what the Neocon WaPo editorial page has had for a decade and a half under Fred Hiatt. WaPo’s news, on the other hand, has continued to provide a range of both great and questionable reporting; its reporters are roughly about as tied into the IC as the NYT.

In other words, WaPo remains what it was before an oligarch with financial ties to the intelligence community bought it. But we know that reading its content with a critical view, not by mapping out perceived and real connections. Doing that mapping would mark the WaPo as a clear government propaganda outlet that it is not.

This kind of conspiracy theorizing gets dangerous quickly. Even the WaPo — especially the WaPo — cannot afford such games.

Critiques of PropOrNot

  • Matthew Ingram judges that the effort to expand known Russian outlets to a global conspiracy gets out of hand.
  • Max Blumenthal examines some of the funding and past politics of those involved in campaign.
  • Hannah Gais examines PropOrNot’s weird definition of propaganda and (in an update) wonders whether its secretive team has ties to Ukraine.
  • Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald map out how sketchy the PropOrNot group is.
  • Matt Taibbi notes that the left has become as conspiratorial as the right traditionally has been.

Responses from those blacklisted

CIA’s Cloud Storage Just Bought the WaPo

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You’ve no doubt heard that Jeff Bezos just bought WaPo.

Which means the same guy who owns WaPo also provides the CIA with its new cloud storage (unless IBM succeeds in their bid to challenge it).

I’m sure this will have an utterly salutary effect on the news business.