THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR LIES
History matters.
In 2018 the Washington Post and New York Times were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 Clinton/Trump presidential election. On February 20, 2022 the Editorial Board of the New York Post published an article titled: “The Absurd ‘Russiagate’ Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post.” Opening lines from that article:
“For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest,” the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, “that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign”
“Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — did no such thing.
It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy that we now know never existed.”
“how damaging they [the Post and Times] were: to the truth, to the newspapers’ reputations — and to America itself.”
We must all let this sink in: Russia did not interfere in the 2016 Clinton/Trump presidential election and mainstream media totally failed in journalistic rigor and integrity. This fact has been verified by other respected organizations.
In two separate articles dated 12-12-2016 and 7-24-2017, Veteran Professionals For Sanity (VIPS), an organization of distinguished former CIA, NSA, and military intelligence analysts (see steering committee members below), make it clear that the alleged Russian hacking of the Hillary Clinton (HRC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails never happened. VIPS explains in depth that the emails were leaked by an inside source.
From VIPS 2016 article:
“A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else.” “We have gone through the various claims about hacking. For us, it is child’s play to dismiss them.”
“Thus, it remains something of a mystery why the media is being fed strange stories about hacking that have no basis in fact.”
In VIPS 2017 article, that “mystery” is solved:
“The forensics reflect what seems to have been a desperate effort to “blame the Russians” for publishing highly embarrassing DNC emails three days before the Democratic convention last July. Since the content of the DNC emails reeked of pro-Clinton bias [indicating how Clinton and the DNC had unethically undermined Bernie Sanders], her campaign saw an overriding need to divert attention from content to provenance – as in, who “hacked” those DNC emails?
This sordid record of the DNC and the HRC presidential campaign in 2016, along with the lack of journalistic integrity on the part of the New York Times and Washington Post (not to mention MSNBC) in reporting it, is appalling on its own. But the picture is actually much uglier.
On I-23-2023, the respected “Columbia Journalism Review” (CJR) published a four part series titled “Looking back on the coverage of Trump” by investigative journalist Jeff Gerth. It documents the lies and coverups by the DNC and HRC that led to “Russiagate,” and the visceral and irrational hatred of Russia and Putin that now permeates the Democratic Party. (For an excellent summary see Consortium News: The Press Reckoning on Russiagate)
Quoting author Patrick Lawrence in the Consortium News summary of the CJR Report:
“Over 24,000 words and in exceptional detail, Jeff Gerth exposed more or less all of American media’s utterly craven complicity in manufacturing out of sheer nothing all the nonsense about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia as he ran against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.”
“Gerth is a remover of lids under which we find reeking cess, under which we find journalists and editors knowingly, knowingly, knowingly lying, omitting, disinforming, fabricating, and covering up — all in the service of assisting Clinton by smearing her opponent even as Clinton and her husband were ass deep in their obscured and multiple complicities with various Russians.”
“the Steele Dossier was put across as the absolutely authentic, smoking-gun document that would damn Trump, decisively and forever. We now know the [Steele] Dossier was entirely nonsense, commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign”
Quoting the CJR report:
“For the past year and a half, CJR has been examining the American media’s coverage of Trump and Russia in granular detail, and what it means as the country enters a new political cycle” “The result is an encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history.”
“Trump and his acolytes in the conservative media fueled the ensuing political storm, but the hottest flashpoints emerged from the work of mainstream journalism.” “They grew out of stories in the first weeks of 2017 about Trump and Russia that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public.”
“Three days before Trump’s presidential announcement, Hillary Clinton entered the race, and it was she, not Trump, who began her campaign facing scrutiny over Russia ties. Weeks earlier, the Times had collaborated with the conservative author of a best-selling book to explore various Clinton-Russia links, including a lucrative speech in Moscow by Bill Clinton, Russia-related donations to the Clinton family foundation, and Russia-friendly initiatives by the Obama administration while Hillary was secretary of state.”
“By 2016, as Trump’s political viability grew and he voiced admiration for Russia’s “strong leader,” Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and publicly promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia.”
“The Clinton campaign put out a statement on Twitter, linking to what it called the “bombshell report” on Yahoo, but did not disclose that the campaign secretly paid the researchers who pitched it. In essence, the campaign was boosting, through the press, a story line it had itself engineered.”
“Still, several years after the 2016 election, many voters believe Russian meddling had a big impact on those results, and the mainstream narrative in journalism was that it had. A study by Rasmussen in April 2022 found that 47 percent of voters, including 72 percent of Democrats, think Russian interference likely changed the outcome of the 2016 race.”
The ongoing belief of Democrats that Russia assisted Trump in “stealing” the election from Hillary Clinton is every bit as false and corrosive to democracy as the Republican belief that voter fraud resulted in Biden stealing the election from Trump. This is certainly not to support Trump, but the corruption and lies of the DNC, HRC, and mainstream media, are proving more destructive than anything done by Trump. It has turned the Democrats into the Russia hating Party of War and enabled the insane levels of spending on the military/industrial/congressional complex bankrupting America and leading the world to an unprecedented threat of nuclear oblivion. The New York Times and Washington Post should be ashamed of the great harm their lack of journalistic integrity has done to America.
STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center
Skip Folden, independent analyst, retired IBM Program Manager for Information Technology US (Associate VIPS)
Larry C Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Air Force Intelligence Officer (Ret.), Master SERE Resistance to Interrogation Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)
Edward Loomis, Jr., former NSA Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former U.S. Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Sarah G. Wilton, Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.); Commander, US Naval Reserve (ret.)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat